


The Second Mission: Cold and Codependent

by angel_deux



Series: Won't You Let Us Wander [4]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Codependency, F/M, FIx It, Hoth is cold and Jyn is bold, Minor Chirrut Îmwe/Baze Malbus, Sharing a Bed, the continued misadventures of Rogue One, today's theme is:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-19 22:36:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9463310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Everyone thinks the Rogue One crew is codependent, and it's starting to bother Jyn, especially since she thinks they might be right. Leia sending them to freeze on Hoth as a trial run for a more permanent base isn't helping.





	1. You Don't Think I'm Funny Either?

“I hate the Outer Rim,” Bodhi decides.

“You hate Tatooine, to be fair,” Jyn points out.

“Perhaps just Mos Eisley. You have experienced less than one percent of the planet.”

Bodhi looks at K-2SO with the expression of fond exasperation that is so common in all of the droid’s interactions.

“Thank you both for the specificity,” he says, shoving Jyn gently from where she’s perched on his console. With another glare, he turns back to his screen, the green blip flashing again after hours of inactivity. “Okay. _Finally._ The tracker beacon is working again.”

“Maybe your declaration of hatred for the entire Outer Rim was a bit premature.”

“Also vague and dramatic,” K-2SO agrees.

“Terrible infrastructure and also? Too much sand. I stand by what I said.”

Jyn grins at his stubbornness and gives him a fond pat on the shoulder as she heads back towards the main hold.

“I’ll let Cassian know we’re back in business.”

Bodhi grunts, amused and a little doubtful, and Jyn pretends not to have heard him.

They’re fine. They really are. Though maybe it would be easier for Bodhi to believe that if she and Cassian had said more than a few words to each other since they boarded Rogue One yesterday. It’s not that they’re _not_ fine, but it’s a difficult thing to explain, especially to someone like Bodhi, who wants things to be better _now_.

Jyn is willing to wait for Cassian to be comfortable caring about her. She understands his reluctance, and she understands his fear, and she’s willing to be patient about it, even though she misses the sense of inevitability that used to wrap itself around them. Jyn’s never cared about someone in precisely the way she cares about Cassian, so it’s not as if she has any idea what to _do_ about it, and somewhere deep inside her she’s willing to admit that she’s relieved about his discomfort. She’s relieved to slow down, to let herself catch up to her own feelings and let them be explored at a more comfortable pace.

She’s relieved, and yet she thinks there is a sense of _im_ patience, too. She’s never cared about someone like she cares about Cassian, and the _want_ inside her is a growing one.

* * *

Cassian, as expected, is cleaning his rifle in his cabin. The door is open, an invitation, and she leans against the doorframe and watches him.

He knows she’s there. He’s a spy, and a good one. She’s not _so_ confident in her own abilities that she thinks she’s sneaking up on him. But she stays silent and watches him, and he lets her.  

She hates to admit that Bodhi is right about them, but in a way he is. Things have been strange since they left Yavin. It’s not the outward avoidance it was after Kopha, but it’s nothing like what it was before. Before, they circled each other ever-closer, two spiraling paths that got nearer to each other with every turn.  Now they seem to be circling in place, not moving any closer or farther away. Just spinning. Waiting. It feels like breath being held.

“Tracker is back,” she says. He looks up at her, eyebrows raised in expectation. “No messages deferring the meeting again.”

“Surprising.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” At her unimpressed stare, he elaborates. “I move faster on my own.”

“We don’t need to move fast. We need to move careful.”

He opens his mouth to argue, but something in her expression must give him pause, because he sighs and puts his gun back on the small table next to his bed.

“All right,” he says. “You’ll come with me.”

* * *

The assignment is simple enough: meet with Solo’s contact in Mos Eisley, in one of the many shops in the desert town. Deliver the message from Solo, containing the promise of payment from Leia. Set up a drop point for the exchange.

“I would go myself, but you know how it is. Price on my head,” the smuggler had said when Princess Leia apologetically handed the responsibility off to the Rogue One crew.

“His contact in Mos Eisley can provide the Rebellion with building supplies,” Leia had explained. “We just need someone to carry this message from Han. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but Mos Eisley is a dangerous place, and this is important. We can’t delay in leaving Yavin, and we can’t scatter ourselves too far. It’ll make us weak. We need to get to work on relocating the main base. We just don’t have the supplies. Not anymore.”

Alderaan. Jyn had been uncomfortably quiet at that, letting Cassian do the consoling murmur. Not that he was very good at it either: Cassian framed most of his apology around the loss of resources to the Rebellion, tacking on some faint praise of Leia’s father like an afterthought. It was _brutal_. Luckily, Leia was the only person Jyn knew more dedicated to the Rebellion than Cassian; she understood.

It’s a simple enough task, but an important one. As far as Jyn is concerned, that’s the best kind. Cassian, too, despite his caution, seems strangely all right. Mos Eisley really _is_ a dangerous place.  But compared to some of the other places Jyn has been, it feels almost relaxing. Gangsters and criminals are nothing compared to the Empire. And they’re what she’s been dealing with her whole life. It’s almost a comfort to be dealing with familiar evils again.

“I’m still not counting this as a real mission,” she says, adjusting the straps on her bag as she mutters. Cassian lets out a quiet sound of agreement at that. He peers into the crowded doorway of a cantina as they pass, but aside from that he doesn’t look even his normal amount of suspicious.

“It’s barely an assignment,” he says. “Draven wasn’t happy Leia chose to send us.”

“That’s because Draven is somehow more controlling even than _you_ ,” Jyn points out. Cassian sends her a sideways look that might be an attempt at a glare, except that his lips are turned slightly up at the corners, diluting any effect.

“We’ll have a new base soon. Then it will be back to work that actually involves _work_.”

“I don’t know. Trying to keep Bodhi from dismembering K2 was probably the most effort I’ve put into anything in your service so far.”

“Know that I appreciate that,” Cassian says dryly. It’s quiet for another long moment, and Jyn tries to find the words to keep the silence between them from becoming uncomfortable.

Finally, she settles on, “Skywalker painted a very dismal portrait of Mos Eisley, but this doesn’t seem all that bad. I think he thinks my upbringing was a bit more delicate than it was.”

Mos Eisley is downright quaint when you stack it up against some of the places she lived with Saw – not to mention some of the places she had to endure after he left her.

“Would hate to see Skywalker on the Ring of Kafrene,” Cassian mutters. Jyn gives a quiet laugh, prompting an interested glance from her captain. “You’ve been there?”

“Places with transient populations were the first place I’d go after getting burned by a group or a partner. Once Saw left me, I learned how to talk my way into work. Places like Kafrene, Aloaran, Takodana. Saw half the galaxy that way. Hopping off one ship and onto another. Harder for anyone to track me if they were looking.”

“That makes sense. At least Takodana is neutral. Kafrene must have been difficult.”

“Must’ve been difficult for you too, Rebel scum,” Jyn points out, just a little too deadpan to sound truly teasing. Cassian lets out that tiny huff of a laugh that he does sometimes, an amused puff of air that’s barely a laugh at all.

“That’s one good thing about Mos Eisley. They hate the empire as much as we do. But they hate all forms of government, really.”

“Even the people who aren’t criminals?” Jyn murmurs. Cassian snorts.

“If I see one of those, I’ll ask them, but you may be waiting a while,” he says. On seeing the strange look she’s sending him, he defensively asks, “what?”

“You making jokes continues to be unsettling.”

“Me? _You_ are saying that to _me_?” he asks. His incredulity makes her laugh a little, and she catches him looking at her lips.

She pretends not to notice, just like she pretended not to notice last time.

“What, you don’t think I’m funny either?” she asks, eyebrows raising in mock offense. “We must not get along at all, then.”

“I, for one, can’t stand you,” Cassian answers, absent, as he checks the tracker again.

The truth is that Cassian _is_ really funny, mostly because he’s not, because he’s too serious, because he doesn’t spend a lot of time making jokes. He’s funny in the same way she is, with a wry certainty of death. A fatalistic edge to all his attempts at humor.

It makes sense that he’s the one responsible for K-2SO’s personality, in other words.

It’s true, too, that getting to know Cassian, getting to be the person who occasionally is able to make him chuckle, eyes averted, like he’s ashamed to be laughing at all, is a thrilling sensation. And when he makes a joke, when he _tries_ , she feels a lightness in her chest that hasn’t been there since she was very young.

“I think Bodhi has reached the end of his patience with the sandstorms,” she says when the moment has passed.

“And I have reached the end of mine with our contact,” Cassian mutters, checking the tracking transponder again and nudging her down an alleyway. “Three times he’s changed the meeting location. For a chat about building supplies!”

“Aren’t you the one who always tells me you can never be too careful?”

“And now I’m at the end of my patience with _you_ ,” Cassian grumbles. “Here. Hopefully this time he’s actually shown up.”

* * *

Despite the trouble actually getting a face to face, the contact, a grouchy Rodian, gives them what they want fairly easily, and a drop point is set up for him to deliver the supplies when needed. That done, Cassian and Jyn head back to the ship. Unlike Kopha, nothing goes wrong. No one appears out of an alley to tackle them and blow the whole thing to bits. Everything is, well, sort of easy. Unsatisfying.

“Finally,” Bodhi breathes once they’re safely inside, the doors to the ship closing behind them. “Home.”

* * *

But they aren’t going home. Not as far as Jyn is concerned, anyway. Jyn would rather spend every moment aboard tiny, cramped Rogue One than a single night on Yavin or any of the transport ships they’ve spent time on. She’s a Sergeant. Officially a Rebel, and she carries out orders and accepts her responsibilities and has even gotten used to people treating her with deference she doesn’t think she’s earned. But the Rebellion isn’t her home. Rogue One, her friends, her captain, they’re the home she found after Scarif, and she would much rather if all her time in the galaxy was just them, flying in their ship, running their missions.

It’s lonely when there are others near, is the point. Everyone has responsibilities. Chirrut trains some of the younger recruits in the art of hand-to-hand combat, occasionally sparring with Luke Skywalker, drawing a crowd. Baze, too, has found work as an instructor (heavy weapons, naturally). Bodhi has become quite the mechanic, often with K-2SO by his side, when K-2SO isn’t busy in meetings with Cassian. And Jyn? Jyn is a hired gun, isn’t she? If she isn’t involved in a debrief, there’s nothing for her. She is, at best, underfoot. She tries to help out, tries to do what she can, but she never feels right until they have a mission again.

Cassian notices. Of course he does. He has tried to talk to her about it more than once, has tried to ask her why she disappears when they’re on Yavin. He has asked her where she goes. Jyn doesn’t have the heart to tell him that she stays out of his way because his work is important and because hers isn’t. And because she doesn’t want him to recognize so soon that without the team, without the mission, she offers nothing to the Rebellion. 

* * *

When they land, Chirrut and Baze aren’t the only ones waiting to see them. They’re standing with the Princess, with Leia, watching the Rogue One crew disembark. When Mon Mothma isn’t here, Leia is the one in charge – though Draven would probably have a few opinions about that determination – and Jyn always feels anxious when she talks to the younger woman. Leia speaks harshly, directly. She’s hard, like Jyn herself, and so Jyn likes her. But there’s a wariness to that appreciation. Even more than Cassian, Leia is someone who would do _anything_ for the Rebellion.

After Kopha, Jyn overheard Leia asking Cassian why he hadn’t just left her behind like he was supposed to. And it’s not that Jyn doesn’t understand that – Leia followed her question up immediately with “to be retrieved when it was safer for your team”, making it clear that she meant no disrespect to Jyn herself – but still it makes her nervous. Jyn has rarely had reason to be defensive about other people in her life. And being a part of a _team_ like this is a new feeling, because even among the Partisans there was never a true feeling of belonging with anyone other than her adoptive father. And so there’s a sort of wounded-animal quality to Jyn’s approach to Leia. She sees the fire in Leia’s eyes that she felt in her own heart the day they boarded the ship to Scarif. She knows what that fire will make a person do, will make a person want to sacrifice.

She’s constantly afraid that Leia will turn that fire on Rogue One, will turn that need in their direction and burn the family Jyn has only just found. Not intentionally, not with purpose. And that would almost make it worse: everyone she cares about becoming collateral damage for the war. Jyn is caught in a place between understanding, being willing, being eager, even, to put her life on the line for this work and wanting to shield her crew from everything that Leia might expose them to.

“This can’t be good,” Bodhi says when he sees the Princess, mirroring Jyn’s thoughts as they stand just inside the cargo door, the ramp lowering slowly to the ground. Cassian, to Jyn’s surprise, makes a noise of agreement. Jyn swallows a lump of fear in her throat and tries not to think too hard about it.

“Welcome back,” Leia says. She says it to all of them, but her gaze falls on Cassian last. “I’ll need to see you and Sergeant Erso in the mission room as soon as you’re ready. I’m sorry, I know it’s not ideal.”

“Another mission? So soon?” Cassian asks. Jyn pretends to be bothered by the news, but only because _he_ seems to be. 

“If you want it,” Leia replies. Cassian bristles at the implication: _if your team is strong enough_.

“Of course,” he says.

* * *

Jyn overhears a lot, because she’s good at sneaking where she is not supposed to be, and she’s good at being quiet, good at existing in a place so comfortably and for so long that no one even knows she’s there. So she knows what people say about her. About Cassian. About the whole Rogue One crew.

_Codependent._

Maybe it’s because Captain Cassian Andor, one of the most elusive and illustrious Rebel spies (as illustrious as a man can be when his whole _thing_ is anonymity, anyway) disobeyed orders from the Council and stole a ship and a platoon of men. Maybe it’s because he then refused to be separated from the survivors. A lost band of misfits who should have been booted back out into the galaxy the moment they were healed enough to receive their eternal thanks from the Rebellion, if you asked Draven.

But mostly Jyn thinks it has something to do with the fact that fifteen people were in the room the time Mon Mothma floated the idea of sending Jyn alone to an outpost on Geonosis.

“Just for a short investigation. There are rumors of some of Saw’s rebels recovering some of their numbers there. If she was able to gain their trust, we may be able to recruit a few.”

“Alone?” Jyn had asked. Her chest constricted at the thought, but she was willing to do it. She had been alone for most of her life. It didn’t even really occur to her that she could refuse. But Cassian, seated beside her, hadn’t reacted well.

“Sergeant Erso is my asset,” he told the Chancellor.

Draven, quick as always, replied, “she’s a Rebellion asset.”

“She is a soldier under my command.”

“And _you_ are a soldier under mine,” Draven reminded him, sharp and brittle. Jyn had looked at Mon Mothma and had seen the understanding there. That was somehow worse than Draven’s incredulous frustration. Cassian wasn’t the type to refuse orders. She _knew_ that was true. And yet he was arguing with Draven for _her._

“It’s okay,” she had said to Cassian. “If they need me to do it alone…”

Cassian hadn’t even looked at her.

“Rogue One is a team. You can send all of us or none of us, but I was told I would have control over my people, and that is what I mean to have.”

He had refused to back down. It was the wildness in his eyes that led to the rumors. The whispers. Not just about the two of them – though there were more than a few of those – but about all of them. Broken, lost, codependent Rogue One. That’s why they go on the missions no one else wants. That’s why they only go together, or not at all. They can’t do anything else.

Some days, Jyn dismisses it. Some days, it burns inside her, and she wishes she had gone to Geonosis, just to prove to everyone that she could have.

* * *

But she didn’t _really_ want to go to Geonosis. She didn’t really want to be alone. That’s obvious in the way it’s a relief when Leia doesn’t try to separate them. It’s a relief when she sits them down in her small command room and says, “we need a team to go to Hoth.”

_A team_ , Jyn thinks, relief in her bones, followed immediately by a harsh accusation of _codependent._

It’s just the three of them here. There’s not much in the way of privacy on Yavin, especially not now that all but the most essential personnel have cleared out, taking most of the equipment and furniture with them, but it’s no surprise that the Princess still has her space. Leia gets what she wants on Yavin. Yet another reason Jyn likes her.

“Is Hoth the location they decided on?” Cassian asks, referring to the Council as always with a bit of a sneer that tells them he remembers their cowardice when it mattered most.

“It is. It’s remote. Far from the Empire’s watchful eye. Uninhabited except for some creatures we can put to work and some we can easily avoid. It’s a good choice.”

“But?”

“But we need to be sure. We want to send in a small team to set up an outpost and remain in place for as long as it takes for our leadership to be satisfied that a base can stay undetected. It won’t be fun. Hoth is a cold, barren place. Now that we can begin negotiations with Han’s builder, thanks to you, we can make progress on amassing what we need to build a base and relocate our people. But it isn’t going to be a quick process. So many moving parts…it needs to be done carefully.”

“So…you want us to set up a practice base and then just sort of sit in it?” Jyn asks. It’s rare for her to speak in a briefing, but Leia smiles at her, welcoming the challenge in Jyn’s tone.

“I _did_ say it wasn’t ideal,” she says. “Aside from leading a team of engineers and builders in making the base habitable, you’ll also be directing some of our scientists in climate studies, survivability studies, visibility tests…it won’t be as easy as sitting around, of course, but it might just be one of the most straightforward missions you’ll ever receive from the Rebellion.”

“I don’t know. Mos Eisley was kind of nice,” Jyn says, leaning back in her seat, but she’s sold on the idea already.

“How long?” Cassian asks.

“We don’t know.”

“What kind of supplies? Weapons?”

“Everything you’ll need to survive a long term field assignment.”

Cassian looks over at Jyn, and she shrugs. Arches her eyebrows in the way that means ‘might as well’. He turns back to Leia.

“All right. We’ll do it. We’ll lead the team to Hoth.”


	2. I Don't Care What They Say

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone reading and commenting!

Jyn pretends not to be as sold on the mission as she is. Secretly, she’s thrilled at the idea. A long assignment? Away from Yavin, from Draven, from the constant stress of fearing Imperial retaliation with nowhere to run? Leading a small team with only Cassian to answer to? It’s as if Leia reached into her brain and picked out the perfect mission for her. Besides, she’s never been to an ice planet. Cassian has several times mentioned growing up on Fest, and the others all spent most of their lives on Jedha, so they’re well used to the cold, but for Jyn it has been a long succession of planets filled with warm sand and humidity. Maybe that’s part of why she’s trying to smother a smile, keep it professional, while Cassian’s blank spy’s face is looking a little grimace-y as he storms off toward the ship to inform the others.

“Can I speak with you a moment?” Leia asks.

It’s quiet, designed to not carry to Cassian. Jyn almost pretends not to hear her, just out of instinct; she doesn’t like the politics that surround the Rebellion, and dealing with them without Cassian by her side always feels a little like drowning. But it’s _Leia_ , Leia who Jyn respects, and so she falters and looks over her shoulder.

Leia is smiling patiently, placidly, her head tilted a bit to one side. Both endearing and calculated. Jyn sometimes wonders how Leia can stand to look so peaceful. Her whole planet _gone_ while she watched. Gone as a punishment for her disobedience to the Empire. Her family. Friends. Everyone she has ever loved. And still she stands there, rigid but still somehow blurred around the edges with compassion.

When Jyn heard that Alderaan had been destroyed, she locked herself in her quarters, curled on her bed, and cried her heart out. She hasn’t been able to speak the name of the planet yet. Shame. Guilt. The feeling of not having done something fast enough to save _billions_ of lives.

And here Leia stands, unbroken. Jyn is several years older than the princess, but she feels dwarfed in comparison. She looks up to her. She wishes she could be more like her and less like the traumatized wreck who can’t sleep through most nights without waking to strangled, gasped-out names of dead fathers and the still-living crewmates who die in her dreams.

Her respect makes her uncomfortable, and so she squares her shoulders and shrugs, feigning annoyance.

“You aren’t going to ask me to run a separate mission, are you?” she asks. “He may be out of earshot, but he’ll turn right around if he senses it.”

“No,” Leia says, allowing a small, prim laugh. “But thank you for the warning. I just wanted to talk to you, alone, about your role here.”

Jyn feels, absurdly, as if she has been caught. Trapped, the way she felt when she was staring down those Imperial investigators who landed her on Wobani. She swallows back reflexive defensiveness (the kind that led to her _punching_ those Imperial investigators who landed her on Wobani).

“What about my role?” she asks. Despite her best efforts, the defensiveness is obvious.

“You, Bodhi Rook, Chirrut Îmwe, and Baze Malbus all arrived together. You all took your oaths to the Rebellion together. All accepted my thanks together. And yet the others have all adapted to their new places here.”

“So have I.”

“To missions, yes.”

Silent at that, Jyn plans to wait her out. But if there’s one thing the princess is good at, it’s waiting.

“I don’t know what else you want from me,” Jyn finally says, breaking first, crossing her arms over her chest, feeling like a petulant child in front of this woman several years her junior. She hates this, this petty feeling that wells up within her because she _knows_ she isn’t good enough to be here. She has always known. It shouldn’t be a surprise. And yet to have it laid bare like this…

She wishes that she had just walked after Cassian. Ignored the princess. Left on her mission, where she could finally breathe again, without the humid air of Yavin choking her, stifling her, suffocating. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed that she doesn’t belong, that even in her outcast team, she sticks out, but at least it could have been delayed. At least she could have put this horrible conversation off.

“I want you to feel comfortable with us,” Leia says. Admittedly, that catches Jyn even more off guard than the rest of it.

“I am,” she lies, reflexive.

“You’re not. You _vanish_ when you’re not on assignment. Captain Andor isn’t the only one who has noticed. I don’t need to know where you go when you’re off mission. I don’t even need you to stop. I just want you to know that you aren’t the only person who feels lost when they’re not fighting. It takes some getting used to.”

“Fighting is all I know how to do,” Jyn says. The words are almost dragged from her. Leia has that effect; she makes you want to tell her, even though you also really don’t.

“Believe me. I understand. But you can learn to be so much _more_. Just…give it some thought. I know you follow Captain Andor. But you could be a leader in your own right. I’ve heard of the speech you gave to convince the Council.”

“Then you heard that it failed.”

“Mon Mothma, my father, Admiral Raddus. They all believed in you. The Council is wary, and they’re slow to agree to action, if they ever manage to get their heads out of their asses long enough to agree on anything at all. You almost convinced them of what I would have said was impossible.”

Trying a different tack, Jyn says, “not everyone wants to be a leader.”

“You sound like Han.”

“Well, I don’t think _he_ would make a very good leader either, frankly,” Jyn says, allowing a slight smile. Leia chuckles and leans against the table, looking at Jyn appraisingly.

“It’s the job of a good leader to recognize the quality in others. I like to think I’m pretty good. I think Captain Andor is, too. I’m not saying you have to change anything right away. I’m not saying you have to leave your team. I’m only saying that you could have a new purpose, if you wanted one.”

“This isn’t my life,” Jyn says, helplessness rising in her just from the barest suggestion of leaving her family. “If there was something I needed to do, something only _I_ could do, I would do it, because it would be the right thing. But until that time comes, I’m staying where I am. I’m not ambitious. I’m not here for the Rebellion, for the politics and the military, and I’m not here to follow orders that I know are wrong. I’m here to _help_ however I can. It’s not for me. It’s not for my career or any, any aspirations or anything to do with what you’re suggesting. I don’t want to be anywhere other than where I am right now.”

_With my family_ , she doesn’t say, but she doesn’t think she has to. Leia smiles and ducks her head, giving a slight nod. Jyn thinks she might look a little disappointed.

Fine. Let her be.

* * *

It’s not as if Leia told her anything she doesn’t already know, and yet just the conversation intensifies the feeling of eyes on her wherever she goes. She’d thought it was something she had gotten used to. Something she accepted with a wry bitterness every time she met the eyes of one of her fellow Scarif-survivors. But it’s different now, and it rankles at her. This horrible defensive feeling settles between her shoulder blades, tight and deep. She goes to her quarters to empty it out, clearing the space so the Rebellion can use it during her long mission, and tension spikes at her temples, leaving her with a headache that she knows will follow her.

That helpless need to _run_ is back again.

To have her insecurities realized, pointed out, her protests and explanations ignored, it makes her want to sprint into the jungles of Yavin, makes her want to hop in an X-wing and find herself some distant planet where no one will expect _anything_ of her. She knows that wasn’t Leia’s intention. Leia was trying to _help,_ wants her to feel more comfortable, not less. But being singled out, being noticed for being someone who could be doing _more_ , it makes her skin burn, itch. _Not enough_ , it says. _You’re not enough._

* * *

Jyn has never been one to depend on others. Mostly that came of not having anyone she could depend on, but even when there _was_ someone, she’d had too much experience with people leaving. It was easier to rely on herself. She’s never been one to share her feelings, either. She has preferred silence, has preferred isolation, every time.

But when she does that, when she depends too much on her own emotions, she almost always chooses to run from them. It’s self-destructive. It’s avoidance. She hates it every time she does it. She doesn’t want to do it now. The needful part of her, the part that wants to flee in the face of Leia’s judgement and the fear that Cassian feels the same, it needs to be silenced. And she knows from experience that if it’s left alone, despite her best efforts, it will only grow louder and louder.

Sometimes it helps to stand in the hanger or just outside the temple, staring at the ships, knowing that she could take one if she wished. But she does not need or want the temptation, does not want any of her team to catch her having any doubts whatsoever, and so instead she knocks on the door to Cassian’s quarters.

“ _There_ you are,” he says when he opens it.  He moves aside to let her in without hesitation, and that’s the only reason she enters: the unquestioning acceptance of her presence in his space. She thinks he probably wants to go over the next day’s journey – Cassian is nothing if not an overpreparer – but she speaks before he can, the moment the door closes.  

“Have people spoken to you about me?” she asks.

Cassian freezes, mouth half open to speak.

“Can you be more specific?” he finally asks. Jyn pretends not to notice the flush in his cheeks when he says that. Pretends that her own face doesn’t feel warm in response.

“Leia asked me…she seems to think…well, she’s right. I’m not doing everything I could be, and I just...”

“She doesn’t think you’re doing enough?” Cassian asks, halfway turned back to the door, ready to go argue for Jyn’s place here. And it isn’t that she doesn’t appreciate that, and it isn’t that his support doesn’t make her feel like she could do anything, but it also doesn’t help everyone’s perception, she doesn’t think, if he goes running after perceived slights to her.

_Codependent_ , that traitorous little voice reminds her.

“No, no, Cassian, wait. She just implied that when we’re here, when we aren’t on mission, that I should be more comfortable. More proactive. Everyone else has something to do, and I _don’t._ And I was just wondering...”

“No one has said anything to me,” Cassian says, and his tone tells her why, too. Anyone who floated even a hint that she was less than dedicated, pulling less weight than she could, would have his wrath to contend with.

“It’s not something...I’m not looking for you to fix it,” she says. Already she regrets coming here to him, though it had seemed like the only option at the time. She tries to remind herself that he doesn’t mind this, that he would prefer this to her keeping her worries too close to the chest. He wants to help. Of course he does. He _always_ wants to help. “I know she’s right. When we’re here, I’m _not_ comfortable. I want to be back out there, anywhere else. I _told_ you, I’m just not used to being in a place like this.”

“You never defined what _like this_ means,” Cassian reminds her, not quite smiling, though she knows him well enough now to recognize the slight tightness at the corners of his eyes that means there’s a smile there somewhere.

“I’m not asking you to fix it,” she repeats. “I just…I wanted to make sure you didn’t feel the same way.”

Understanding flashes across his features, and he takes a step toward her. She wants to take a step back, but she stays standing where she is, watching him with mounting curiosity. There is a part of her that feels detached from this moment, that feels utterly separate.

“Why would you ask that?” he asks, which she wasn’t expecting. It takes a moment for her to decide on an answer.

“Because I know how much the Rebellion means to you. You carry it more than I do. And if you think I’m not…”

“You don’t need to prove yourself to me,” he says.  Which nails it so firmly that she’s at even more of a loss. “You don’t need to prove yourself to anybody.”

“Maybe I _should_ take a mission on my own. Just...”

“Do you want to take a mission without me?”

She could point out that she meant without the rest of the team, not just him. But she doesn’t.

“No,” she says, surprised at how honest it is, how easy it is to say it.

“Then we work together.”

“Cassian…”

“You’re worried about what they say.”

“Aren’t you?”

The word _codependent_ hangs over them. The implication – _broken_ – does too.

“I don’t care what they say,” Cassian says.

And it’s really damning that she decides that if he doesn’t care, it means that she doesn’t care either.

She can practically hear Leia’s smirk.

* * *

That night, the dreams come back.

Not that they ever leave for very long, but she always has a sliver of hope that maybe this is the time they’re gone for good.

They never are. They always come back.

Most of the time, she’s crouched in the grass on Lah’mu, and her mother is dying. As always, her mother dies quietly. She doesn’t scream or moan in pain. It’s Galen crying, Galen making noises of despair. Jyn wonders if Lyra will be all right. Surely she will be.  

Sometimes she’s on Eadu, and she’s too slow to reach her father. She slips on the ladder. She tries to call out to him but her voice dies, and Galen dies, and she dies with him. Sometimes she watches the sniper round enter Galen’s head, Galen’s chest, and she looks up to the ridge and sees Cassian there, and she knows he’ll shoot her, next. _For the Rebellion_ , his voice says, but it’s colder than his voice has _ever_ been.

Sometimes Saw hands her a blaster and tells her to wait in the cave until morning. She knows he isn’t coming back.

Sometimes, some of the worst times, it’s Cassian who wraps her fingers around the weapon. Cassian who promises with sad eyes while she cries and tries to make him promise.

“I’ll be back,” he says, but she’s been here before. She’s felt this before. Saw didn’t come back, and neither will he.

Sometimes, Krennic shoots her on the tower, and she dies just feet away from the Death Star plans, untransmitted.

Tonight, Cassian falls, and he doesn’t get back up.

* * *

Jyn is glad to put some distance between she and Yavin 4. Cassian, who was at first reluctant, seems equally satisfied. Jyn wonders if it has anything to do with Leia’s talk (on second thought, Jyn _knows_ it has to do with that).

They are the only ones who seem remotely enthusiastic about the prospect.

They accepted the mission without consulting the others, so Cassian reminds them that, as always, they are free to stay behind. Baze seems to hope that Chirrut will choose that option, but Chirrut predictably refuses to sit out two missions in a row, and so the warriors are loaded up. K-2SO will go anywhere Cassian goes, though he complains heartily enough about frozen joints and tells anyone who will listen about the kinds of horrifying lifeforms that Skywalker reported seeing in his initial survey of the planet. Bodhi is harder to read. He agrees to come easily enough, but he also makes a point of reminding them about a hundred times that the temperature on Hoth is unsurvivably low. When Jyn reminds him he can take a break on Yavin, he looks at her like she’s lost her mind.

“No, I’m going with you,” he says, like the other option isn’t an option at all.

_Codependent_ , Jyn thinks again.


	3. This Isn't Sustainable

Hoth _is_ cold. Bodhi was certainly right about that.

Jyn first sets foot on the snow after two hours of listening to Cassian and K-2SO bicker about the likelihood of various caves containing dangerous lifeforms (“ _Again_ with the lifeforms!” Bodhi shouts at one point, stunning them into blissful silence, though it picks up again just as steadily once Bodhi has gone back to his work). The cave they spotted from the air turns out to be much too small for their purposes, but it’s thrilling to stand in it, even shivering as she is, bundled up like a child against the cold. She watches her breath spiral like smoke around her, stares up at the pillars of ice hanging above them, and she feels this giddy excitement over the _newness_ of this.

“It’s not going to work,” Cassian tells her, pulling her from her reverie, and she sighs.

“Can we make K2 walk to the next set of caves?” she wonders. Cassian laughs, the sound muffled through the scarf he has pulled across his mouth.

“No. He’d freeze before he got very far. I’ll find him something to do in the hold. He’s just trying to help.”

“Oh, he’s always trying to help,” Jyn sighs, nudging Cassian’s shoulder with hers as she walks by him.

“From what he says about the Wampas, we really _don’t_ want to run into them,” Cassian reminds her, still standing with whatever instrument he’s holding that tells him this cave isn’t good enough. Jyn makes a noise of annoyance loud enough to carry back to him.

“Not you too. If I never hear the word _Wampa_ in my life, it’ll be too soon.”

* * *

They make three more trips out into cave systems that Cassian ultimately rejects (“Too big, but a possible site of interest for the base once they’re ready”, “Too small”, and “Not enough geothermal activity”, whatever that means) before Jyn’s excitement is gone.

“That was fast,” Chirrut says when Jyn groans at the prospect of going back out there a fourth time. Her face is still red, her nose still partially numb from the last time they landed.

“He’s just going to give some reason we can’t build here, I’m going to freeze for no reason, and you lot are going to be in here sipping caf,” Jyn mutters, shrugging back into her still-dripping coat.

“You volunteered to have his back. I’m sure he would be more than happy to go out there without you,” Chirrut says, smug as ever. Baze, who Jyn genuinely thought was sleeping on the couch beside Chirrut, lets out a little grunt of amusement at that.

“Speaking from experience? She won’t let him,” he grumbles. Jyn glares at his closed eyelids until Cassian emerges from the cockpit.

“You ready?” he asks her. She tries not to hear the quiet snickers from the two warriors when she turns to face him.

“Of course,” she says.

* * *

The sixth explored cave system is deemed “good enough”, by Cassian’s exacting standards, which means Jyn reports it as “virtually perfect” when the others ask. There’s a large cave that could be transformed into a hanger, and several smaller interconnecting tunnels that lead to _other_ caves. One near the back looks like it might have once been the lair of a Wampa or two, but it’s clearly old and abandoned. A whole herd of tauntauns comes sprinting out of another, and Cassian and Jyn make an immediate silent pact with one another that they will never speak a word of the fact that they both make undignified noises and fall over each other in surprise when it happens.

(Chirrut asks them why they’re both breathing hard, and Baze asks why Jyn has a blossoming bruise on the underside of her jaw, and neither she nor Cassian will answer, but Jyn is fairly sure Chirrut just _knows_ that Cassian accidentally kneed her in the face when he was trying to get them both out of the path of the charging snow lizards).

Satisfied with their choice, Cassian allows K-2SO to call the other ships down from orbit. Twenty pilots and engineers in thirteen different ships, most of them with only one or two people on board. Only ten ships can fit comfortably in their new hanger, so the first job is easy enough to decide on: digging it out, making it larger. Most of them get to work on that, but they have to retreat back inside their ships for warmth too often to make much progress.

“New plan,” Cassian decides, blowing breath into frozen fingers, stamping his feet against the cargo bay floor. “Send those three ships back for more supplies.”

“Blankets,” Bodhi calls from the front of the ship, wrapped up in the jacket Jyn draped over him several hours ago.

“Blankets. We’ll need more fuel, if we have to keep the ships running to keep the temperatures in up. Laser cutters so we can dig out this space faster. We’ll need to block off the hanger as soon as possible, which means we need a door. I’ll be back.”

He goes back out into the cold to talk to the others, and Jyn burrows deeper into her coat, and it feels like even her bones are shivering.

* * *

They spend the night in their ships. It’s too risky to orbit the planet, and Cassian is worried about running the engines in a cave made of ice for too long, and so they find a nearby crevasse in the planet’s surface, and the ships that haven’t already been sent back to Yavin pack themselves in there, hopefully hidden from any Imperial scanners. There’s some of Cassian’s sought-after geothermal activity down here, heat rising from beneath the ice, keeping them from freezing to death. Cassian doesn’t let them keep the ships running for very long at a time, out of an (over)abundance of caution. K-2S0 deems it ‘technically survivable’.

Jyn has never been so cold.

More pilots head back to Yavin the next morning, carrying requests for anything insulated.

* * *

They spend their first full day digging. They go in shifts to compensate for how quickly they get cold. Cassian leads a team of engineers in putting together the blast door for the hanger, which arrived in pieces from Yavin at first light, but it won’t be ready for tonight. Probably not for several more.

Jyn requests aloud that the next pilot to fly back to Yavin delivers a very profane message from her to the Council, with special emphasis on Leia.

“They won’t do that,” Cassian tells her with a patient grin.

“Give it another night,” mutters one of the engineers as he passes them.

It’s not just the cold. It’s the lack of coordination, the necessity for gloves making everything bulky and slow. Hardened engineers drop curses almost as much as they’re dropping their welding tools. No one can decide if they’d rather breathe easy or keep their scarves up around their faces. Everything is _frustrating_. Jyn spends most of her day helping dig in the hanger, and by the time the temperature drops enough that Cassian judges it time to give up and fly the ships back to their icy hole, she honestly can’t see that they’ve made the hanger any bigger.

The second night, Jyn doesn’t sleep at all.

* * *

She and Bodhi are judged by the others to be next to useless at digging (an insult that neither of them take lightly, though Cassian delivers the news as politely as possible), and neither can be trusted to have the delicacy that welding requires, so they and a team of a few others take a speeder out to see if they can locate the herd of tauntauns that she and Cassian uprooted from their homes. Riding them will be easier than struggling through the snow on foot, and they’ll need to be able to travel some distance to set up a security perimeter to make sure they aren’t being watched.

This leads to Bodhi being nearly trampled by an indignant tauntaun when he tries to help Baze with the ropes, and Jyn has to – while stifling laughter – drag her pilot away from the lizard creature, which snorts and stomps around them and finally prances off over one of the dunes.

“We’re definitely worse at this than digging, right?” Bodhi asks, half-sprawled on top of Jyn in the snow, and she laughs as she lets her head drop back against the ground, patting sloppily at his head with her glove.

“Cheer up. We’ll get better at it.”

“Oddly optimistic for you.”

“Oh, I’ve passed the point of being able to feel _anything_ ,” Jyn tells him.

“Get up, both of you,” Baze growls, storming off to the speeder. “This isn’t over yet.”

Luckily for them all, Baze takes the escaping tauntaun _very_ personally, and by the end of the day, they manage to capture five. They secure them in the cave from which the tauntauns originally appeared, since it’s got one of those heated crevasses and some lichen, enough to keep them from freezing or starving to death until the team can better figure out what to feed the smelly beasts.

The extra blankets are in stock by the time they’re ready for bed, but Jyn wakes up hours early because the chattering of her teeth shook her awake.

* * *

Bodhi finds her on the fourth day trying to chew nearly frozen rations, hunched up under all three of her allotted blankets on the couch in the main hold, her fingers bone white with cold.

“I lived on Jedha, growing up,” he says. “Not a warm planet. This? This is the most miserable I’ve ever been. We’re supposed to live here?”

“I can’t feel any part of me except my headache,” Jyn agrees. Bodhi sits next to her, pressed up close against her. He huddles down against his jacket, same as Jyn.

“This isn’t sustainable,” he says quietly. “I don’t care how isolated it is. We can’t live here.”

His voice breaks in the middle of the last sentence, and Jyn can tell he’s as tired as she is. But there aren’t exactly words she can offer him, words of comfort or encouragement, because he’d know they were a lie. She just leans her head against his.

“We’ll get through it,” she tells him. That, at least, she believes. She’s comforted when he nods. When he covers her frozen hands with his warm gloves.

* * *

That night, she slips an extra blanket onto Bodhi’s bed when he’s busy in the cockpit, warming up the ship.

It’s a mistake, because she’s even colder than usual. Not that three blankets was doing her much good – one of the pilots on rotation is probably landing at Yavin now, carrying a request for _more_ blankets and also Jyn’s very vulgar message for the Council – but even with her coat on, with her two blankets, with gloves and a scarf, she’s freezing.

It _seems_ like a mistake, but then again, if she wasn’t absolutely freezing, wasn’t almost dying, she would never have worked up the courage to go to Cassian’s room.

Actually, she goes to Bodhi’s room first, almost knocks on his door. The only reason she doesn’t is because his light isn’t on, doesn’t show under the door, and that means he’s probably already asleep.

That’s the excuse she makes for herself.

She pauses by his door, and she knows what she’s doing. She knows it’s ridiculous. Bodhi would gladly wake up. He would probably accept her. Even if he didn’t, it wouldn’t hurt to be turned away. She would understand, and he would be kind about it, would explain why he didn’t feel comfortable with so many hand gestures and qualifications about how it’s not _her_ , it’s just _him_ , and she would be okay. And if he let her in? It would be sweet. It would be warm. It wouldn’t have any strange shadows attached to it, any impossible feelings. It would be easy.

There are so many reasons she should go to Bodhi instead, but she leaves his door without knocking to try.

The light is still on in Cassian’s quarters, and she talks herself into believing that this is the thing that decides it. She knocks before she can talk herself out of it. She’s clutching her blankets to her chest like they’re a shield against rejection, against this fear she has that he’s going to think ( _know_ ) that there’s a more embarrassing, more personal reason she came here and not to Bodhi’s.

He answers the door, still in his clothes, still in his coat. He’s half-wrapped in a blanket he must have tried to discard as he crawled out of bed. He takes her in, takes in her form loaded with blankets, her hood pulled up more to hide the blush she fears will creep into her cheeks than to keep her from the cold.

“Body heat,” she says. She meets his eyes, stubbornly refusing to be embarrassed. Refusing, too, to look away. Cassian flushes - she knows she isn’t just imagining his slight change in color in the dim light - and it makes her feel a little more confident when she says, “Baze and Chirrut never complain about the cold.”

“Well,” Cassian admits. He might be gearing up to explain to her the difference between them and Baze and Chirrut, but she doesn’t let him.

“If you’re uncomfortable, just say so. I’ll ask Bodhi instead.”

Cassian hesitates again, his fingers on the door button, like he’s going to shut the damn thing in her face. But instead, he steps aside.

It’s a mistake, his body language says. Things are already too delicate between them. It’s a mistake, because this will make it worse.

But this is Hoth. And it’s cold. And they can dissect what it all means some other time.

She drops her blankets on his bed and removes her coat. He does the same, taking hers and draping it over his on the small chair by his small desk. Wordlessly, efficiently, they strip down to their underclothes, and Jyn is reminded, though she dares not say it, of Scarif. Changing from their imperial disguises to their rebel gear. This should be almost comically less tense than that, and yet Jyn feels her heart beating in the same uncertain rhythm at which it was beating during their time in the vault.

( _Peering up at him, hanging from the window, ready to jump. K-2SO dead beyond the vault door. This was it._ )

It’s not quite the same thing, but it _feels_ like the same thing. He pulls back the covers, already unsettled from what was probably an earlier attempt to sleep. She climbs into the bed, movements awkward and uncomfortable, stilted by the cold of being without the layers that haven’t been off her body for more than a few minutes on this freezing planet. Cassian follows, and he pulls the blankets over them. She wants to say something pithy and unconcerned to show that this doesn’t have to be so serious, that this can just be utilitarian and normal and smart, even, to share body heat. But just like in the elevator on Scarif, her words die on her lips, and he must be having the same problem, because they stare at each other as they try to get comfortable.

The good thing about so small a bed is that there’s no awkward negotiation of how close they can get while still maintaining some distance. There’s no choice but to breathe each other in, hands awkwardly fumbling for an appropriate place to rest. Jyn decides on curling on her side, away from him, his arm tucked beneath her head like a pillow, and he settles into the curves of her body like he was meant for those spaces, his cold hand finally deciding that the stomach is a safe place to rest.

Her tank top has ridden up, and his cold fingers brush against her skin. She hisses against the temperature of it. He starts to withdraw.

“No,” she says, catching his hand and moving it back where it was. “Just surprising.”

“Is this all right?” he asks, whisper hoarse and not very steady. Again she realizes that this isn’t easy for him either, and she nods. He shuffles closer, the small gaps between them vanishing. A heat begins to unfurl in Jyn that has nothing to do with the blankets and everything to do with his body behind her and his breath tickling the back of her neck.

It’s terrifying, the need inside her. Not just for him, not just the want that almost led her to kiss him on Scarif. Maybe it’s the cold, or maybe it’s just more codependence, but she wants so badly to turn into his embrace, to bury her face in the crook of his neck. She wants to wrap her arms around him. Taste his pulse, trail her fingers through his hair. She wants to be _closer_ than this, and there’s already no space left between them, and she’s so afraid.

She’s afraid, but the fear is diluted by her exhaustion, by the warmth of another person behind her. The shivering abates, her body slowly heating up, the freezing cold of Hoth forgotten. His fingers are still splayed across the skin of her stomach, lightly curling under her, against the mattress, possessive enough to make everything else matter just a little less. They breathe together, her back rising and falling against his chest, and it lulls her in a way she doesn’t think she’s ever felt before.

 _Safe_ , her mind whispers. _You’re safe._


	4. You Need to be More Careful

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't seem to stop updating this story daily, but I urge you all not to get too used to it! I'm sure at some point I'll slow down, but I'm just so. obsessed with the Sharing a Bed trope that I can't stop expanding what was originally an 11,000 word story. It's currently sitting on my harddrive at 18,240 with a good meaty chunk of plot left to edit. Thank you all for continuing to comment and inspire me!

When Jyn wakes the next morning, she’s comfortable.

It seems like an understatement, but in truth it strikes her like something profound. Jyn has almost _never_ woke without some kind of complaint. Lingering pain from a fight. Headaches. Cold. A ragged gasp from whatever dream shook her back to consciousness.

But this time, it’s just warm. A rosy, not-too-stifling heat, and last night’s need and last night’s fear both seem like foreign things, because there can be nothing bad or dark or dangerous about this feeling now.

Cassian’s arm is tighter around her, having moved from her stomach to somewhere just below her breasts in the night, like he’s trying to curl her closer. She can feel the shape of his face, his nose pressed against the top of her spine, his forehead against her hair, and he’s still breathing deeply in sleep, his breath warm on her skin.

It’s so tempting to pretend, to stay here, to burrow deeper into him, to sate the need inside her for just a little longer. But it’s _because_ it’s tempting that she has to leave, and so she uses all her skill to ease her way out from under his grasp without waking him.

He sighs, turns over onto his stomach, and her fingers twitch at her sides, resisting the urge to trail along the scar she’s never seen before that slices down his spine, long and white, jagged through his tan skin. She _can’t_ resist pulling up the covers slightly, giving him some warmth to replace what she’s taking away. She can’t avoid hearing the sleepy noise of contentment that rises up from within him, more vulnerable and human than anything he’s ever said.

She gets dressed quickly after that, too afraid of herself to stay any longer.

* * *

She’s digging some rations out of the cargo hold when he finally emerges from his cabin. She’d never thought this far ahead, never thought of _after_ , but she’s Jyn Erso, and she’s a born liar, and this _isn’t going to be weird_.

“Morning,” she says, and she tosses him a pack. He thanks her with a wry smile, tipping the easily-caught rations in thanks in her direction. “What’s on the agenda today?”

“More digging. Security Perimeter. Putting together the door.” Cassian shrugs, tearing open the ration pack and grimacing down at it distastefully. “More of the same.”

Jyn grunts agreement and brushes past him, arms filled with food for the rest of the crew, tossing it down on the table in the main hold so they can pass it out amongst themselves.

“You’re chipper today,” Chirrut observes, despite the fact that she just plopped three packs of solid, disgusting food down with very little care, nearly spilling Baze’s caf. He’s right: Jyn _is_ chipper. Chipper enough that she isn’t even that annoyed by his obvious attempt at digging.

“Slept through the night. Miracles do exist,” she says simply, easing down onto the couch beside Bodhi. The pilot has his goggles crooked, a blanket still draped around his shoulders, and she reaches up and fixes them for him, earning a tired grin and an absent _thank you_. She catches sight of Cassian pretending not to smile down at his food, his expression just slightly _proud_ , and her heart does that awful, wonderful little clenching thing it does around him.

“Miracles do not exist,” K-2SO says from the cockpit, all at once, like he had been trying to hold it back. Everyone gets a good laugh out of that, tired, and she and Cassian even manage to lock eyes without anything feeling strange.

_See?_ She wants to tell herself. _The world didn’t fall apart._

* * *

Too bad they have to go back out into Hoth and ruin it.

* * *

Cassian’s team are nearly done putting together the heat-insulating blast door, which means that Bodhi gets assigned to a team that’s setting up the electronics to work the thing. It gives the pilot purpose, which Jyn is glad for, even though her co-conspirator in constant uselessness is no longer with her. Chirrut is happily working with a team doing environmental studies – from what Jyn can tell, he mostly seems to be asking questions, but he’s enjoying himself – and so Baze and Jyn volunteer to do the perimeter.

Simple enough, Jyn thinks. Cold, but simple. Ride out and place sensors every so often, making sure the engineer back at their little base – Engineer Allar – can get readings off all of them. It’s just the sort of thing she and Baze are suited for: silent work that requires a lot of endurance but not a lot finesse.

They saddle up two of the tauntauns – one of the scientists practically following them out to the entrance of the hanger, nervously trying to impart every bit of technical data he has so they don’t get his precious creatures killed.

“Be careful out there,” Chirrut calls from his place with his group, trying to pretend he isn’t as worried as he is. “I know you have trouble getting by without me to watch your back.”

Baze gives a good natured snort of derision, which makes Chirrut’s smile grow wider.

“I’ll manage,” Baze finally says, gone slightly softer in a way that makes Jyn have to hide her own smile behind her scarf. Anything that makes the old warrior melt makes her feel the same way.

But this is Chirrut, who cannot let a moment stand soft for too long. He pretends to sniff the air around them – filled with the hideously awful smell of tauntaun.

“My love, you smell better than normal. Did you finally shower?”

“All right, I’m leaving,” Baze grumbles, but even _Jyn_ can hear the smile behind his voice as he turns his beast and rides it toward the mouth of the cave.

“Look after him, will you, little star?” Chirrut asks. Jyn feels a pride at being entrusted with this, and she doesn’t bother to hide her smile this time.

“Of course I will.”

“And I will look after her,” Baze reminds everyone, looking from Jyn to Chirrut and then to Cassian, who looks momentarily frozen in place by Baze’s pointedness.

“Good,” he finally says, clipped and slightly warning. Professional and blank, except for the slight tightening around his eyes that says he’s worried. “It’s dangerous out there. Please be wary.”

“See you when we get back,” Jyn says, waving as she follows Baze slowly, trying to get the hang of steering her mount. Tauntauns, even still-mostly-wild tauntauns, are fairly docile creatures, and she’s pleased to see that this one follows her commands with only a modicum of fuss.

“We caught the weak ones,” Baze reminds her, like he can tell she’s starting to feel good about their success yesterday. She gives him a bit of a glare, jumping with surprise when she feels Cassian’s hand on her leg. She looks down at him, now standing just beside her.

Still the blank façade, but his voice trembled last night when he held her, and so she feels now that she has the ability to see past it, at least a little.

“I mean it. Be careful. Both of you. I know you like to take risks, but this is important. You can’t be out there too long. Nighttime temperatures are unsurvivable. You need to be back before the sun sets. Understood?”

“Understood,” Baze says. When Cassian looks to Jyn, she nods. Briefly puts her hand on his, just a quick pat.

“Understood,” she promises.

* * *

Technically, they _do_ make it back by sundown. Well, two humans and one tauntaun make it back by sundown. And both humans are alive, and only one is bleeding.

“So really,” Jyn says, clutching Baze tight with her uninjured arm, shielding herself behind the older man’s broad back as best as she can against the chill, though her teeth chatter and make her voice difficult to understand. “I don’t see that Cassian has any reason to be angry. We followed his instructions.”

“Didn’t he _say_ ‘be careful’?” Baze asks.

“Umm,” Jyn admits, letting out a withering sigh. “Yes?”

Baze chuckles, but she can hear the worry in his voice, and she wonders if she sounds like she’s fading. She _feels_ like she might be, but she’s still got her grip on him, and she doesn’t feel any more numb than she was a few moments ago, and she’s fairly sure that all the blood in her body has frozen solid, so there’s no _way_ she’s still bleeding.

* * *

It happened like this:

They decided they could get in one more sensor marking, and they radioed their intention to Allar, who agreed.

“Only one more,” his crackling voice responded through the comlink.

“Yeah, we aren’t looking to stay out here much longer,” Jyn replied dryly. Baze probably snorted, but it was getting harder to hear anything with the wind picking up.

That’s probably why they didn’t hear the blasted Wampa until it was already on them.

It made this awful screeching noise, throwing itself into the two Rogue One crew members, and Jyn remembers very little of the short, painful fight that followed except that she ended up pinned under her tauntaun, three clawmarks in her shoulder, and Baze fought the thing _bare handed_ until he was finally able to reach his blaster rifle and shoot it dead.

“Stay with me, little sister,” Baze had said, struggling to get her out from under the dead weight of her poor animal.

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere,” Jyn joked, trying not to flinch as his well intentioned movements sent pain radiating up her legs. “I need to tell _everyone_ about what you just did.”

* * *

Chirrut is waiting practically outside the hanger when their tauntaun approaches. He yells back over his shoulder, and Cassian and Bodhi come running with Allar and Lars and Sharpa. K-2SO even deigns to wander over.

“Where’s Jyn?” Cassian calls, and Jyn gives him a tiny, barely-there wave to assure him that _she_ is the snow-covered lump growing on Baze’s back. She has a feeling it doesn’t do much good, from the way his brow furrows even further.

“Is she all right?” Chirrut asks, panic carrying in his voice.

“I’m not sure. Too many layers to see the damage,” Baze says. His voice has a note of apology in it, but she’s glad for his honesty. Chirrut murmurs unhappily, and Cassian curses as he goes to her side.

“What did I tell you about being careful?” he asks, and Jyn frowns at him, exhausted.

“Blame the Wampa, not me,” she manages to say.

Bodhi and Cassian help her down, having to pry her stiff uninjured arm from around Baze, but it’s Baze who carries her over to the ship with the medical supplies, with the team’s only doctor, Mai, who looks almost relieved to finally have something _medical_ to do.

“What happened?” she asks. She clears the small cot in the center of the room, making room for Baze to lay Jyn down gently.

“Baze _punched_ a Wampa,” Jyn answers. She’s been waiting to say the words aloud, and now she leans back, satisfied.

“We were attacked,” Baze replies, seeing she won’t be much help. “She took a swipe to her shoulder.”

The doctor is patient, has Jyn move her arm, has Jyn tell her – reminding her sharply that this is no time to try and look _tough_ – how much pain she’s in. Then she gives Jyn a dose of painkillers, lets them set in before she tries moving her arm again. It’s much easier, much less painful, and Jyn gives a grateful nod.

“Okay. Good enough. One of you help her get out of those layers,” Mai says, rummaging through the disorganized medical supplies in the crate on the floor. Cassian steps up. Jyn pretends not to notice that his fingers are shaking as he unzips her coat.

“She saved me,” Baze says, which strikes Jyn as funny, mostly because she doesn’t remember that at all.

“Did I?” she asks, sort of laughing. Mai and Cassian exchange a look and then decide to take Jyn’s lack of memory _far_ too seriously.

Mai moves Cassian aside to shine a light in Jyn’s eyes and ask her some more questions. Cassian doesn’t go far, standing next to the doctor with his arms folded across his chest, posture tight and controlled, face schooled into that infuriating blank mask that looks warped by the worry that makes its way past his strongest defenses.

“Well, it’s not a concussion,” Mai decides. “Disorientation from the cold, maybe. Blood loss. The total fucking misery of this awful planet. Lot of reasons she might be spacy. Pilot, crank the heat in here, will you? We need to keep her temperature up. Captain Andor, can you please…?”

She gives him a look, and he responds with a nod, understanding. He clears out everyone except the Rogue One crew, sending the others back to work, giving orders in a no-nonsense voice that no one would dare try to argue against right now.

When they’re all gone, Mai looks annoyed that there are still four too many people crowding her tiny infirmary, but she lets it slide.

Back to the jacket, and Cassian and Jyn work together, Jyn letting out small hisses of pain when it’s too much, and Cassian always stops, freezes, waits for her to work it out or to direct him another way. The injured shoulder is obviously the worst part, but her back and other arm are both sore from her ride back to base, and it takes some careful maneuvering. Cassian obliges, never hesitating to support her body with one arm, helping ease the jacket off with the other. Then it’s the two warm layers of shirts beneath it, increasingly difficult to pry from the wound, the blood sticking and requiring Cassian to pull the fabric loose, murmuring apologies all the while, his other arm tight around her. Mai floats the idea of just cutting through the material entirely, but Cassian and Jyn both protest the waste of resources, and so Mai falls silent and watches.

When it’s finished, when Jyn is finally left in her undershirt, the shoulder exposed, Mai lies her back on the bed and gets to work. Bodhi is given the responsibility of playing the part of nurse, which seems like a disaster waiting to happen, but works out all right: as with piloting, Bodhi’s nerves make for a laser focus on the important stuff, and so his hands are incredibly steady as he follows Mai’s instructions to the letter.

 She doesn’t ask any more questions, which Jyn is glad for, though Cassian fills the silence by insisting on a detailed report from Baze.

“This should be good,” Chirrut says, leaning back against the wall, though he still has his ear turned towards Jyn, in tune with the almost silent noises of pain she can’t help but make as the doctor works.

(If Jyn was in any state to pay attention, she would notice that Cassian’s shoulders tense up just a little more with every sound she doesn’t realize he can hear).

“We were almost finished. The Wampa came out of nowhere.”

Shrugging, Baze seems to think that’s good enough.

“He fought it _bare handed_ ,” Jyn says, in her excitement trying to sit up, earning a stern glare from Bodhi and the doctor both. She sheepishly lets them lie her back down, though she repeats “bare handed” again, trying to emphasize it with the intensity it deserves.

“There’s no surprise there,” Chirrut says admiringly, causing Baze to flush a little. Jyn may be in an irritating amount of pain, but this still might be the best moment of her entire life.

“It surprised us,” Baze elaborates. “Almost took me in the head, but Jyn pulled my tauntaun out of the way just in time.”

“Well, little star. Looks like I owe you Baze’s life.”

“Apparently,” Jyn mutters. “I don’t remember anything except ending up on the ground, trapped under a dead animal.”

“You took a hard fall,” Baze admits. He’s looking at her affectionately, and between that and the cranked-up heat, Jyn feels real warmth coming back into her.

“Did you really kill it with your hands?” Cassian asks, reluctantly impressed.

“He absolutely did,” Jyn lies, straight-faced, before Baze can admit that he finished the predator off with a gun. Baze’s only hint of a smile is a slight twitch of the lips, and he meets Cassian’s eyes when he speaks.

“Strangled it,” he answers. “Easy.”

* * *

Jyn’s patched up quickly, and Mai helps her shower off, the grime and blood falling away easily, leaving her clean and new again. By the time she’s ready to make it back to her own ship, the sun is almost down.

“The door is finished, but we’ll be spending the night in the crevasse again,” Cassian tells her when she arrives back on Rogue One. She carefully schools her face into a non-reaction when she nods. “To be safe.”

“To be safe,” she repeats.

* * *

On the ship, once it’s back in the crevasse, the nighttime cold starting to seep in slowly, like it always does, Bodhi pauses in the door to her room.

“Yesterday, I had an extra blanket,” he says. “Thought maybe I miscounted. Didn’t raise a fuss. Today, I see Cassian coming out of my room, and now I’m swimming in blankets. I’ve got five. Thought maybe he was just being his usual self-sacrificing ‘oh I’ve killed people which means I don’t deserve to be warm’ self, but then I saw _you_ have only two blankets, even though you’re supposed to have three. Which got me thinking.”

“Maybe you should go into espionage after all,” Jyn says, pretending not to be surprised.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

“If your guess is that we’re conserving blankets by relying on body heat, then yes. That’s what happened last night. A bit presumptuous of him to assume it’ll happen again, but I suppose it answers my question of if he’s up for it.” She pauses, waiting for a reaction. He nods slowly, like he’s still trying to wrap his head around it. “You’re welcome to join us.”

Bodhi laughs, flushes quickly. Jyn arches an eyebrow.

“Um, thank you for the offer? But no. No, that makes me very uncomfortable, and besides, I’ve got five blankets now. I don’t need your body heat, and quite frankly, I don’t want it.”

Jyn laughs as he ducks out, casting another look over his shoulder with a mockingly disgusted sigh.

She’s less embarrassed than she should be, she thinks. Bodhi’s jokes aside, he seems mostly relieved that she and Cassian are _okay_ again. And if Cassian was dropping off a blanket for their pilot, that means he’s planning on her being there tonight too.

And, well, who is she to disappoint her captain?

* * *

“I was afraid you weren’t coming.”

He smiles as he says the words, a lot easier than he smiled yesterday. Jyn smiles at him in return, and it might just be the deliriousness of the constant cold and the waning painkillers, but she _thinks_ she might actually sound flirty when she says, “and leave you with only two blankets?”

“Bodhi noticed?”

“He noticed I gave him one of mine, too. I asked if he wanted to join us, but he said no.”

“We never would have fit the three of us anyway.”

“Creatively, sure we could have. Pretty sure his rejection was discomfort based. Guess I’m lucky you didn’t turn me away last night.”

He makes an incredulous noise, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him.

She unzips her coat and starts to maneuver out, but Cassian is there, suddenly, forgetting to keep the distance between them that seemed to have been agreed upon last night.

“Here,” he says, and he’s shrugging out of his coat quickly, leaving it on the floor. “Let me help you.”

Her breath catches to hear the words. This is a problem, isn’t it? That his closeness, that his eagerness to help, that her eagerness to _let_ him is so affecting? She should be stronger than this. She _was_ stronger than this, once. She knew to rely only on herself. But the fact that he _wants_ to help her, that he’s someone who will reach for her without a second thought to give her aid and comfort, it’s something unfamiliar and new, and she doesn’t know how to react to it. Her heart thuds painfully against her ribcage as he helps her out of her coat, as he lifts her torn and still-bloody shirt over her head, fingers skimming her sides, careful not to jostle her injured shoulder too much.

And then he stays there, stays standing too close as he tilts his head down closer, inspecting the bandages that wrap around her shoulder, under her arm.

Does he _know_ he’s doing this? Does he know what it does to her? She has to wonder.

“Don’t tell me you’re critiquing the _doctor’s_ work,” she says quietly, startling him out of his thoughtful scrutiny. He clears his throat as he steps back, shedding his outer shirt as he goes, picking his coat off the floor.

“Just making sure,” he says, his back turned to her as he folds his clothing. She climbs into his bed while he’s turned away. It’s freezing, cold enough that she feels comfortable enough to make a joke.

“Hurry up,” she says, and he lets out that quiet little laugh, turning back to look at her.

She pretends that his gaze on her doesn’t have the effect that it does, and she arches an impatient eyebrow at him.

He’s careful, this time. More because of her injury than because of any awkwardness. Actually, it’s easier than it was last night. She tugs on his arm to adjust it behind her head, and he nudges her legs forward a bit to make room. The tentative touches have been replaced with more comfortable assurance. He pulls the blankets over them, and Jyn feels a bone-deep relief that this can happen. The need inside her still scares her, but at least it’s not visible to him. If it was, she’s sure it would drive him away. It wouldn’t pull him in, his fingers brushing over the bandages, sending tingling pinpricks of awareness up and down her arms. It wouldn’t lead him to tuck his arm around her stomach again.

There’s a slight pressure on the back of her shoulder, the slightest movement, and her entire being is focused on it, is alight with it, with the press of his lips against her injury. Feather-light, barely there at all, but she knows it for what it is. Her breath stops in her lungs, burning like they’re filled with smoke.

“You need to be more careful,” he says, close behind her, his voice rumbling in his chest, pressed against her. She nods, breath hitching in what might be a sob. She is torn between exalting in her ability to be here with him, in her ability to feel safe with him, and shame at how quick she is to feel tears pricking at her eyes from such a simple act of kindness. Codependent, maybe, but she knows part of it is starvation. Thirst. For so long she was denied something as simple as another person’s touch, and now that she has it, it can’t help but be overwhelming.  

“Believe me,” she says quietly, pushing down the urge to cry. “I’ve learned my lesson about Wampas. K2 will be so smug.”

His laugh is barely audible, but it tickles the hair behind her ear. She uses the moment to shift herself even closer. It may just be the embarrassment, or that need inside her, but she’s quicker to warm tonight. Every part of his body that touches part of her feels like fire.

It feels like a step closer than it was before. And the need and the fear inside her continue to be warring things, continue to spin around each other the way she and Cassian walked towards and around each other in the hanger on Yavin.

_Welcome home_.

For the first time in maybe her entire life, Jyn thinks she might have high hopes for tomorrow.


	5. She's a Bad Influence on You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops, here's another chapter. Thanks for reading and commenting! I'm glad you all seem to like the Bed Sharing trope as much as I do!

It’s even harder to get up the next morning than it was the first. Cassian’s weight against her is too soft, too warm, too much. It’s too tempting to give in and close her eyes again.

It’s even worse when he murmurs in his sleep and pulls her closer.

Longing and desire, love and lust, those are very different things. And Jyn has never before felt them all for the same person. But Cassian. _Cassian_. Cassian is home, is warmth, is the place she goes when things are difficult. He’s assurance and strength and the reminder she needs that she isn’t alone. Not anymore. She hasn’t had that in another person in so long. Not since Saw, maybe. A person who cares about her. A person who wants her to be safe. And there’s more to it than that; there’s companionship and their ability to fight alongside each other and the softness in his eyes when he looks at her. Cassian is not a soft man. She knows that. She knows the guilt he feels for the things he has done, but she knows he would do them again if he had to.

No, Cassian is anything but soft.

Cassian is sharp, is urgent, is tense and coiled, ready to spring. It’s only when he looks at her that the softness comes through, and she _knows_ that that means something, even if they’re both taking their time getting to what exactly that is.

She won’t pretend to understand exactly what he sees in her. But he’s had so many chances to leave her behind, and he hasn’t. And even when he was trying to put emotional distance between them, he never left her. Never abandoned her. And he hasn’t stopped looking at her the way he does, like he’s _memorizing_ her.

It’s the same way she looks at him.

And sometimes, when she’s alone, she imagines him dipping his bearded face towards the juncture of her legs, and she trembles just from the fantasy, just from the imagining.

Cassian is more to her than any one person has ever been, and she doesn’t know how to reconcile that with their closeness now.

So she gets up, she resists his sleepy pull to keep her here. She gets dressed as silently as possible. She retreats out into the cold of the rest of the ship. It’s better for both of them if she does this now. She’s not sure what would happen if they both woke at the same time. She doesn’t know how uncomfortable it would be. She has this probably childish fear that the awkwardness, that the subsequent discomfort and strangeness of the conversation, would disrupt the magic of it somehow. Would wake him up to what a danger this is. Would drive him away again.

Codependence might be a new feeling for her, but she’s starting to think it might not be an entirely bad one. Based on the fear he felt after Kopha, she doesn’t think Cassian would feel the same. And he might be right to worry about the closeness, to distrust the momentary peace, because she knows how quickly that can change.

It’s only been two nights. Two nights and already she’s so afraid of having to go back to her frozen bed, alone.

K-2SO is waiting in the cockpit, having monitored the radar all night, and he looks at her with such disdain when she emerges from the living quarters that for a moment she’s sure he knows where she’s been.

“Wonderful, I’m so glad to finally have some company,” he says, as always in the voice that tells Jyn he’d rather if it wasn’t _her_ company.

“Morning to you too,” Jyn says, trying her best to hide her relief that K-2SO either doesn’t know or isn’t going to say anything about it. “I’m going to...get my shoulder looked at.”

“Shouldn’t you wait for Cassian to wake up before you leave?” K-2SO asks. Jyn bites back a much more telling retort and settles for a shrug as she leaves the ship. “Vague as always,” the droid says to her retreating back. 

* * *

The blast door works. The hanger is big enough to fit all the ships at once. More supplies arrive from Yavin: insulation for the living quarters, more electronics, furniture for a small mess hall and an infirmary and the required number of beds. More doors are installed, separating the hanger from the rest of the base, separating rooms from hallways.

Jyn spends all day following Bodhi around, doing what he tells her to, trying to get the power working in the rest of the base. He and three engineers spend most of that time arguing, unable to decide who’s being an idiot and who’s right. Chirrut and Baze drift in and out, updating them on the communications array that they’re putting in the main command center. Cassian burns his hand while trying to solder some equipment and then spends several hours hovering over everyone else’s shoulders, watching them work, offering immediately-turned-down suggestions to Bodhi and the engineers.

It takes almost eight hours for them to figure out the problem, but once they do, the entire base lights up.

They’re all tired enough, all of the scientists and engineers and Doctor Mai, to gather in the new mess hall, with its awful, mismatching furniture (left over from whatever the Rebellion could spare), and a few bottles of Corellian whiskey. Even Cassian, terse and only mildly amused by the whole thing, agrees they could use a break.

It should feel like a major victory, but everyone’s too cold and too tired to _really_ celebrate it. Bodhi falls asleep amidst all the chatter, his head pillowed in his arms on the table, Chirrut absently rubbing his back. Baze gets drunk enough to fall off a chair, but shows zero other signs of intoxication (disappointing to Jyn, who assumed he would become giggly and utterly unlike himself, and was looking forward to witnessing that).

“This should be more fun,” she complains, looking over at Cassian, and she can tell her expression must look pathetic, because his smile is an apology.

“Not a lot of fun to be had on Hoth,” he says.

Jyn takes another sip of her drink to hide her reflexive, definitely-inappropriate response to _that_.

* * *

Hoth is still frigid, still seeps into Jyn’s bones with a tenacity that’s almost supernatural, but it doesn’t feel as hopeless.

Cassian checks the temperature readouts from inside the hanger last night, with the door installed. He argues with a few of the scientists about it. A group of three volunteer to try to spend the night in the base as a test while the rest of them spend a final night in their crevasse.

“We need to be safe,” Cassian says in response to the groans from the gathered engineers. “This is what we’re _here_ for. And if it’s too much for them, I’m sending word to the Council that we need to start rotating people out.”

That, at least, seems to appease everyone. Even Jyn is starting to think of Yavin with a certain amount of fondness.

“Exactly how much warmer will it be in the base than in here, once it’s ready?” Bodhi asks K-2SO, who takes a moment to answer.

“Not much,” he says finally, following after Cassian.

“I said _exactly_ ,” Bodhi points out. When K-2SO ignores him, he looks indignantly at Jyn, who’s following alongside him, chewing absently at a ration bar.

“I think that’s his version of trying to be nice: _not_ telling you the harsh truth,” Jyn says. Bodhi looks equal parts touched and discouraged to hear that.

* * *

She’s standing by her bed, drawing back her covers (fully intending to pretend to try to sleep on her own until she’s sure the others at least have their doors closed). Cassian knocks on the frame, and when she looks at him, he looks as exhausted and run down as she feels.

There’s a certain selfish part of her that’s thrilled to see him looking so weary. That looks at him and sees not the tightly wound intelligence officer but the man who helped her out of her coat last night with delicacy she did not know he was capable of. Maybe tonight she’ll help _him._ Maybe tonight she will overcome her fear and soothe _his_ hurts.

“I think I’m going to stay up and monitor their progress,” he says, and she tries not to react to how _disappointed_ she is.

“Oh,” she says. Her face is carefully schooled, carefully blank, but she thinks he can probably hear it anyway. She gives him a small smile that almost certainly makes it worse. “Um…all right.”

He hesitates, opens his mouth to say something else. But she watches him change his mind, and he gives her a nod that’s almost as awkward as her ‘all right’, and then he ducks back out into the hallway.

The room seems about ten degrees cooler once he’s gone.

* * *

She lasts about an hour before she joins him, sliding into the co-pilot’s seat. They don’t discuss it. He doesn’t ask for an explanation. She doesn’t offer one. Just crawls out from under her covers, half frozen, and brings her blankets along with his into the cockpit.

He’s got a headset on, is communicating with the engineers in the base, so he doesn’t speak to her when she enters, but she watches the way his eyes light up when he sees her. She knows that this is what he wanted to but could not manage to say in the door to her room: _if you wanted to keep me company.._.

Cassian isn’t used to asking for something like that. Jyn knows because she isn’t either. They both need to figure out how to get better at it.

She drapes one of his blankets over his shoulders and slides another across his lap. He smiles up at her. He still looks tired, and she still wishes that she could have pulled him in, warm and safe against her. She wishes she could have been given the chance to help him. But she knows she isn’t imagining his relief to have her here.

She doesn’t tell him that she might have a problem now, falling asleep in the cold. She doesn’t even dare _think_ about how the bigger problem might be falling asleep alone.

K-2SO is affronted when he emerges from the back of the ship and finds her sitting in his seat, but Cassian frames it like Jyn is giving him a rest, and so the droid goes to reluctantly power down, glaring at Jyn the whole way.

She smiles her thanks at Cassian. He smiles a _you’re welcome_ back.

They’re not touching. She can’t quite manage that organically, without making it obvious she craves it, but with her knees curled up in the seat, her head tucked down to her chest, listening to Cassian’s occasional murmurs into the headset and the quiet, indistinguishable replies from the scientists back at the base, she feels close enough to home that it helps her drift off.

* * *

She wakes up once to Cassian idly running his hand over her hair, absent, unthinking, as he says to the engineers that they should try to get some sleep, that he’ll be waiting to hear from them, that he’s glad they’re doing okay.

* * *

When the sun comes up, the base is deemed survivable, but not comfortable. Hoth Alpha is officially opened.

More blankets are requested. Stronger language this time. A very passive aggressive invitation from Cassian to anyone on the Council who wants to come visit and see firsthand just why so many complaints are traveling back to Yavin.

“She’s a bad influence on you,” Allar says to Cassian when he reads the message, nudging Jyn as he walks to the command center to transmit it. Jyn grins after him.

“He’s right, you know,” Cassian says. It’s quiet. Almost, but not quite, outwardly fond.

“Oh, please. Your message sounds more K2 than me _._ I’d have used much more colorful language. If anyone’s a bad influence on you, it’s _him._ ”

“She has a point,” K-2SO admits from across the room, his mechanical voice filled with pride.

* * *

This time, Bodhi is the pilot chosen to make the journey back, and he takes Baze and Chirrut with him.

They all pretend it’s just a good idea, just to keep Bodhi company, and pretend it’s not because everyone has noticed that Baze’s joints are acting up in the cold.

Baze glowers at everyone as they prepare to leave, especially Chirrut, because he knows them enough to suspect, but he makes sure he doesn’t leave without giving Jyn a (slightly grudging but mostly affectionate) hug goodbye.

“Watch after this one,” he says to Cassian. “No adventures without me.”

“If you think I can promise that, you don’t know her very well,” Cassian points out, while Chirrut laughs knowingly, tugging his partner back towards Rogue One.

* * *

There’s still a lot to do in the outpost to make it more than just technically survivable. Rooms are assigned, established, furnished. Electricity is spotty in some areas, so Jyn spends most of the morning running from place to place, reporting on which rooms are okay and which need more work. The afternoon is spent with Doctor Mai, working on her shoulder and making sure she still has full mobility, and then helping the doctor unpack her infirmary (“since you’re already here”).

It’s never not cold, but it doesn’t have the same oppressive feeling to it. Gloves are good to have, but the engineers can take them off for long enough to work their delicate instruments, and everything goes so much more smoothly. The halls echo with laughter and chatter, not as much cursing and clattering tools and the relatable thump of a fist pounding on some uncooperative piece of machinery. The tunnels and rooms are smoothed out. The tauntauns are given a spot in the hanger, the ships powered down and left cold and empty. It feels real, finally. It feels like progress.

The entire team eats together for dinner that night, sans the alcohol from the night before, and Jyn realizes with surprise that she feels a real camaraderie with these people. She isn’t Jyn Erso, lunatic hero of Scarif. Not to these people. She’s Jyn, _the one who helped me with the lights in the mess hall_. She’s _Jyn, that idiot I patched up after the Wampa attack_. She’s just another Rebel, she’s someone who has frozen alongside them, has helped them lift heavy beams into place, has done a very shit job of digging. They include her in their stories, laugh at her ineptitude in certain areas but cheer her successes in others.

Even without Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze beside her, she feels whole. Loved.

She catches Cassian smiling in her direction once, after she throws herself into a good-natured argument, defending herself from Allar’s commentary on her lack of patience with electrical work. And it’s a proud smile, one that tells her that he’s thinking of their talk back on Yavin. Thinking of her fear that she isn’t doing enough, that she isn’t really a part of the Rebellion after all.

This is what she was missing, she realizes. A feeling of accomplishment. Of purpose.

Hoth is still cold and fucking miserable, but Jyn’s feeling warmer all the time.

* * *

That night, they sleep in their new rooms.

Jyn never manages to drift off for more than what feels like a few minutes at a time. The cold keeps her awake as much as the loneliness, but she just can’t seem to make herself get out of bed and cross the hall to Cassian’s quarters. Sometimes she throws her blankets off her, halfway to her feet, but always she loses her courage and curls back up, glowering at the blank space next to her, trying to work up the courage again.

She’s not sure if she needs to prove to herself that she can sleep without him, or if she’s afraid he’ll turn her away, say _that’s over now, Jyn. That was only when we were too cold to stand it_.

* * *

She’s hunched over a lukewarm caf in the mess hall the next morning when Cassian sits across from her.

“How did you sleep?” he asks. His tone is even enough, polite enough, blank and professional. When she glances at him to get a read on his expression, she may as well be looking at a person she’s never spoken to. There’s nothing of the man who couldn’t stop himself from kissing her shoulder when she was hurt, when she was wrapped up with him in his bed.

She needs to remind herself of those moments from before, because it’s so easy for her to forget. It’s so easy for her to assume that she’s reading too much into it, that his blank face is his real face. So it’s the small things she remembers. Fingers trembling on the zipper to her coat. Lips pressed into her bandages. His arm tugging her tighter in sleep. His eyes brightening as she entered the cockpit.

She shrugs, makes a very unprofessional noise that’s something like a verbal shrug.

K-2SO maneuvers his body into the chair beside Cassian, offering, “I slept fine. But I always sleep fine. It’s easy for me.”

“You mean you could power down at _any_ moment?” Jyn asks, feigning surprise. “Show me.”

K-2SO’s eyes do that re-focusing thing they do that Jyn has come to equate to a human narrowing their expression. Suspicion. Cassian hides a smile in his own drink before clearing his throat, not quite looking at her.

“I may have to move my bunk into your room,” he says, and Jyn arches a slightly incredulous eyebrow in his direction, which she’s immediately glad he doesn’t look up to see. “Leia and Skywalker are coming back with Bodhi and the guardians. We don’t have enough rooms for all of us.”

Leia and Jyn could easily share a room. Luke and Cassian. Leia and Mai. Jyn and Mai. Bodhi and Luke. Bodhi and Cassian.

There are about a hundred alternate combinations, but Jyn shrugs again. Takes another sip of her drink to hide her smile.

“That makes the most sense,” she says evenly.

“Not _really_ ,” K-2SO counters, but Cassian and Jyn both hiss at him to be quiet.

Their eyes meet afterward, finally, and she sees the small, understanding smile on his face.

At least if she’s being ridiculous, being childish, trying to strike this impossible balance between not wanting to admit how much she likes sleeping with him while also wanting it to continue, at least now she knows it isn’t just her.

“I’ll, uh. See you later, then,” Jyn says, standing to go. “Move your bunk in whenever you like.”

“Okay. I will,” Cassian replies.


	6. You're Always Taking Care of Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, have a super long chapter since I didn't manage to update yesterday! (and am getting to this one super late). This story should probably wrap up with one final chapter. Thanks to everyone reading/commenting!

Jyn spends most of the rest of that morning helping the engineers move stuff around, hook up important equipment she doesn’t understand, and wavering on her feet until someone sends her to the mess for more caf.

Engineer Lars is doing what he can to prepare for Leia’s arrival, which mostly involves trying to make everything _look_ better. Cassian is an exacting man when it comes to performance, but appearance isn’t usually his focus (“which is an easy way to live your life when you’re _that_ devastatingly good looking with _that_ little effort,” Lars points out, earning an irritated flush from Cassian and nods of approval from nearly everyone else present). Jyn is roped into helping Lars pair off the furniture in the mess so it looks less piecemeal, less thrown together, more like a professional establishment.

It still looks like shit, Jyn thinks, but she doesn’t tell _him_ that.

Then there’s wires to secure, since they’ve mostly just left them trailing wherever they need to go. K-2SO spends most of his day lending his height to that particular project, securing the wires up along the tops of the walls, out of the way. Engineer Allar, who spent most of the mess hall project telling Lars he was overreacting, suddenly decides that the main control panel is sloppily constructed, so Jyn then ends up on her back, under the table, struggling to follow Allar’s instructions about which wires go where.

She goes back into her quarters to change, her clothes having been soaked through by the snowy floor, and she finds that Cassian has already moved his stuff in.  

* * *

Allar and Lars move their two-man beautification team to the room that was originally Cassian’s – the largest room in the outpost, though by so little that the difference is hardly noticeable. Jyn tries to argue that Leia won’t want special treatment, but Allar ends up constructing a more comfortable bed out of pieces of couch from one of the transport ships. A bidding war starts immediately, with nearly every member of the team packed into the room, trying to argue who will get the bed when Leia goes back to Yavin.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Jyn asks casually, leaning back against the wall beside the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest like she has _zero_ personal stake in this. “Cassian should get it. After all the work he’s done to get this place in shape? He deserves it.”

“Jyn’s right,” Mai sighs, letting her hand trace regretfully along the plush surface of the new bed. “The captain should get it.”

It’s agreed – though with some small bitterness, mostly because no one can come up with a reason why not – and Cassian watches Jyn with a small, incredulous smile on his face until the others clear out.

“That was shameless,” he says, leaning close, the way he did when he told her _welcome home_. “Even for you.”

“You deserve a comfortable place to rest, Captain Andor,” Jyn says innocently, her shrug exaggerated.

“You’re unbelievable,” Cassian says, but he can’t fight his smile down, and she can’t help but smile back.

“I say you take the bed now and let the princess have a cot,” K-2SO says from the hallway, and Cassian jolts back a bit, startled. Jyn hadn’t even realized how close they’d gotten. She clears her throat, glancing back into the hall at the droid, who looms, blasé as ever.

“Now _there’s_ an idea,” she says before she leaves.

* * *

There’s some point during the day, near dinner, when Jyn abruptly realizes that there’s nothing left for her to do. She’d been securing some extra blankets for Leia’s bed (and a _lot_ of extra blankets for Luke’s, with consideration to his Tatooine origins), but once that’s finished, she’s standing in the middle of Luke’s room, and she realizes that she can’t think of a single other thing that needs to be done.

* * *

“Sincere question,” she says as she sits across from Cassian at dinner, plopping her food down on the table. “What now?”

Cassian chews thoughtfully. It’s a hot meal tonight ( _hot_ here meaning ‘at best, sort of warm’, so everyone around them is eating quickly, wanting to get as much warmth as they possibly can before it’s cold like everything else around here).

“Well,” he says, swallowing. “We will have to make reports. Do perimeter checks, keep the sensors running. Maintenance, mostly. I probably will start to rotate some people back to Yavin. You’re welcome to…”

“Please,” Jyn scoffs, and Cassian ducks his head to grin, poking at the food with his fork.

“Maybe you can learn something about electronics,” he suggests. “You’re not the worst at it.”

“Not the worst,” Jyn agrees, laughing.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

_That_ has to be intentional, but when she risks looking at him, he’s back to eating and watching the room around them, never at rest even in the middle of a frozen wasteland, surrounded by friends.

“I didn’t just mean me specifically,” she says, letting the moment pass.

“You’re saying it’s a lot of hours to fill.”

“Yeah.”

“I believe it was Leia who said this wouldn’t be ‘ideal’.”

“Yeah, she wasn’t kidding. So we go from freezing to _bored_ , basically.”

“Basically.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had the luxury of boredom,” Jyn realizes suddenly. “Except in prison. You know, between the torture.” Cassian grimaces at her, irritated by her casual mention of that. “What? We’ve both been there.”

“Believe it or not, I wouldn’t consider this the best dinnertime conversation.”

“I had no idea you were so proper,” Jyn drawls, and Cassian rolls his eyes, muttering something under his breath in a language she doesn’t understand.

“Anyway,” he finally says. “I meant it about the electronics. Would help on the ship, too. Bodhi can’t always be the one putting out the fires.”

“Well, it’ll be boring. But it would make K-2SO furious to have someone else who can fix the ship’s computers.”

“There you go,” Cassian says, a small, appreciative chuckle.

The moment is broken by the arrival of a few of the others at the next table. They ignore the empty seats next to Jyn and Cassian – they may have mostly accepted Jyn into their ranks, but she’s still Cassian’s number two, and Cassian is still serious enough to warrant a certain amount of respect – but greet them warmly.

“Finished up with the sample collection in the hot cave,” says Lexin, talking around a mouthful of food. “Interesting stuff, but it probably won’t have much nutritional value for us. Tauntauns love it, though.”

“Still needs testing,” Sharpa elaborates. “We’ll have more information by the time the princess lands.”

“Good. Thank you,” Cassian says.

“Tomorrow morning, right?”

“Yes. I see you’ve already gotten into the whiskey. I’d advise you stop it there, unless you want to make a fool of yourselves in front of her.”

The two scientists freeze, eliciting laughs from Mai and Allar.

“Um,” says Sharpa.

“That’s…sorry,” Lexin says, a laugh bubbling up.

“We just had a little left over. From the other night.”

“As long as you aren’t sloppy in front of Leia, I don’t care what you do,” Cassian says. Jyn barely bites back a comment at that – if Cassian doesn’t care about his men getting tipsy on the job, she’s pretty sure they aren’t the ones getting sloppy – and looks over at the scientists, giving them a conspiratorial grin.

“Got any left?” she asks.

“Jyn.” A disappointed, long-suffering sigh from Cassian.

“Just asking,” she replies with a vague attempt at innocence.

“I’ve got some tucked away in my room,” Lexin says. Mai puts her head in her hands. “If you, uh. Needed a little something to keep you warm tonight.”

Cassian stops chewing so suddenly that it practically makes a _sound_. Allar breathes out a laugh that’s all disbelief, while Mai sinks down further in her chair.

“What the _fuck_?” Sharpa whispers.

“What? Allar and Mai can bunk together but I’m wrong for trying?” Lexin hisses back.

“Wait,” Allar says.

“ _Whoa_ ,” Mai agrees. Allar looks at Cassian, eyes wide, already trying to explain.

“That’s not…we’re not…it’s just _cold_ on Hoth, and we…”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m sorry, Captain, you’re right. There’s no excuse. We just…”

“I mean I don’t care what you’re doing when you’re off duty,” Cassian elaborates. Jyn glances back at him and sees that Cassian looks possibly more uncomfortable than she’s ever seen him. “It’s not my business. Please don’t try to make it my business.”

“What’s with trying to throw us out the airlock to cover because you just got caught trying to pick up a _superior officer_?” Mai asks, galvanized by Cassian’s apathy.

“Hey, I’m not…I wasn’t,” Lexin says, looking back at Jyn, flushing furiously red now. “I’m just saying. If you were cold.”

“Well, thank you _so_ much for the offer, but my nights are plenty warm,” Jyn replies, diplomatic enough that it sets Lexin more at ease, though it _does_ also make Mai and Sharpa laugh. Allar still looks too nervous to do anything but stare down at his food like he’s trying to read it.

When Jyn turns back around, she doesn’t miss the singularly murderous glint in Cassian’s eye as he flickers his focus over the flustered scientist.

* * *

She probably wouldn’t have mentioned it.

(Probably).

But the lights are dimmed, the tunnels empty, and she and Cassian are walking slowly toward their room, and he’s limping.

“You know,” she says, a prelude to more, and Cassian sighs.

“Don’t say it.”

“Mai told me I had to.”

“Well _Mai_ isn’t your superior officer.”

“No, but she did patch me up after I nearly died from a Wampa attack. Saved my life, probably.”

He sends her an irritated look, which she tries not to laugh at.

“Are you guilting me into going to the infirmary?”

“Is it working?”

Cassian lets out that small, humorless laugh that she hates because it’s so endearing.

“It’s not working,” he says. “I told her. It’s just something that happens sometimes.”

“That’s why she wants to give you a steroid injection. If you weren’t being such a stubborn laserbrain, you’d just go and get it over with.”

“We can’t waste medical supplies on a minor issue.”

“You’re limping.”

“I’m fine.”

Jyn rolls her eyes at him, but she walks a little closer, just in case he needs to use her shoulder. It’s not something that happens often, and he has to be in a lot of pain before he’ll even consider it, but in the months since Scarif she’s noticed that he feels increasingly comfortable putting a steadying hand on her arm when his leg is bothering him. She figures playing the occasional armrest is the least she can do. He fell protecting her, after all.

“K’s right,” she decides. “You really _would_ rust to pieces if you were a droid. Never log any complaints, even about serious issues. Never ask for replacement parts.”

“K said that?”

“Mhm.”

“Since when does K talk to you about anything?”

“Since you started acting like a child and refusing to get simple treatment for an old injury.”

“Okay. I described the medical supplies issue already, and I won’t do it again.”

She laughs a little at the irritation in his voice, though it’s mostly bitter. She really _does_ hate how he works himself half to death and then acts as if it’s nothing, as if he should just be allowed to suffer in silence. It’s exhausting caring so much about someone who cares about their own well-being so little. She wants to pull his arm across her shoulders and help him limp along like she did on Scarif, but he doesn’t want her help, thinks he doesn’t deserve her help, and so she settles for walking slowly alongside him.

And with her brain desperate to fill the silence, she thinks back to Lexin and says, “I’m surprised you didn’t reprimand Lexin more harshly for drinking.”

Cassian’s feet falter slightly, and Jyn hides the smile that threatens to come over her face.

“We’re all exhausted and miserable,” he grumbles. His hand does balance on her shoulder briefly, but it’s quickly back at his side. “Hours analyzing lichen. I’d be drinking too.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Jyn says fondly, which is the truth, and they both know it. With Leia arriving tomorrow, Cassian is tense enough as it is. He would never add the variable of alcohol.

“Maybe not. But the princess doesn’t know their names. Didn’t send them here specifically to run this mission. What about you? Are you nervous?”

He looks at her curiously, and she shrugs.

“A little. Not as much as I would have been a few days ago. I think I’ve done enough, haven’t I?”

“Of course you have.”

“You’d say that anyway, though. Even if it wasn’t true.”

He looks surprised to hear her say that, but he doesn’t try to deny it. Maybe the surprise is the gentle tone with which she says the words. Even _she_ isn’t sure where it comes from. Why it’s as soft as it is.

“Well, it _is_ true. Even she will have to recognize that.”

They’ve reached their doorway now, and Cassian hesitates.

“Are you turning in?” Jyn asks. Cassian makes this indecisive, absent sound that’s something between a scoff and a growl – and Jyn will pack her almost visceral reaction to that sound firmly away for later study. “Come on. There’s nothing you can do now except make the night shift nervous.”

“Feels like I’m missing something.”

“Rest?” Jyn suggests. He gives her a slightly fond roll of the eyes for that. She gives him a pointed look in return. “If you’re not coming in, I could always go check up with Lexin. See if that offer’s still open.”

“Well he _did_ offer you alcohol,” Cassian jokes, but his eyes narrow too sharply, too quickly, for her to believe the casual tone.

“I mean it.”

“About Lexin?”

“About rest. You need it. You’re half dead, you’re limping, and the princess will be here tomorrow. I’m your second in command, remember. If you fall all over yourself or fall asleep on duty, I’ll be the one who has to deal with it.”

Cassian gives her a smile that’s a little too close, a little too soft, and her breath hitches in her chest.

“All right. Fine,” he says.

“You’re always taking care of everyone else,” Jyn says, moving to the door. Opening it, the lights in their room flickering to life slowly when she hits the switch.

“That’s my job,” Cassian points out from behind her. She makes an annoyed _tsk_ ing sound, taking off her coat.

“You know what I mean. You’re always so, so _self-sacrificing_. It’s kriffing annoying.”

He laughs a little at that, and he takes her coat from her outstretched hand, resting it with his on the bunk he moved in earlier.

“We’ve both had our share of that,” he points out, removing the blankets from the second bunk and piling them on the first. Jyn strips down to her underclothes as she considers how to respond.  She spots Cassian looking at the way she piles her clothes right by her side of the bed. She wonders if he’s going to say something about it, going to say something about her vanishing act every morning. But he doesn’t. Just turns back to folding his own clothes much more neatly.

“Mine’s usually an act of reckless bravado, while yours is all pre-meditated,” she says. As always, she’s first into bed, and she crawls under the covers. She usually leaves them open, but he’s taking longer than usual, so she pulls them up around her, nestling into them, trying to get used to the shock of cold fabric against her skin. “I can’t wait until you get the nice bed.”

“I still can’t believe you did that,” Cassian says, remembering, barking out a laugh.

“I can’t believe no one accused me of anything.”

This is the most they’ve talked while they’re doing this, and it feels comfortable. It feels normal, unless she lets herself remember that it isn’t. That if anyone else saw this, and if they could see into Jyn’s head and see the want there, they would worry. They would judge.

She watches Cassian carefully putting away his clothing, watches him limp to the switch to dim the lighting to near darkness. Every part of him looks exhausted, worn down. The bags under his eyes, which have never gone away for a moment since Jyn has known him, are deeper than ever. Crinkled at the corners with pain he tries to pretend he doesn’t feel. She lies back against the pillow and watches him approach. Self-conscious, she thinks, about the severity of the limp now. She knows the feeling; the closer you get to home, the harder it gets to hide the pain.

“Come here,” she says to him, flipping back the covers, and he lets out a tired groan of relief as he eases into the small bed. Jyn expects resistance when she helps pull the covers over them both, when she drapes an arm over him, pulling him close. It is bolder than she’s ever allowed herself to be, but he just looks so _tired_. And if he won’t let her help in any other way, maybe he’ll let her help in this. It’s just the two of them here. There’s no one he has to be strong for.

He’s looking at her strangely in the dark, but she ignores it, ignores the rush of embarrassment and the heat of insecurity that tells her this may be too much. She maneuvers him into place, and he lets out a shaky, trembling breath that ghosts across the front of her tank top, his head pillowed on her chest.

“You’re always taking care of us,” she murmurs, and her hand feels like it’s electric, like it’s filled with a current and a heat as her fingers dare to creep up, dare to brush through his hair the way his combed through hers the other night on the ship. “Let me take care of you for once.”

He nods against her, eyes sliding closed like it’s not his choice, like he couldn’t possibly fight to keep them open for any longer. His arms are around her waist, pulled tight, pulling her closer than he usually does. She’s never held anyone like this. Never provided warmth and comfort. Always she’s been held, been protected. It’s nice, she thinks. It’s nice to be the one helping. It’s the ship leaving Scarif again, Cassian fading in her arms as she became someone nurturing. Someone she didn’t know she was capable of being.

The big difference, obviously, is that he isn’t dying this time.

“Jyn,” he says, voice hoarse.

“Go to sleep, Captain,” she says in reply, running her fingers through his hair again. Growing bolder as he grows more tired.

“Thank you.”

“Of course,” she says, leaving _anything_ and _always_ unspoken.

* * *

“Get up,” she says the next morning, nudging his side. When he blinks blearily up at her, she holds up some caf. “The princess will be here in twenty minutes.”

“ _What_? Why didn’t you wake me up?”

_Because you looked too peaceful? Because you’re always tired and you finally were resting?_

“You were just going to stress me out. Don’t worry. Nothing’s on fire, everything’s fine. Drink your caf.”

Cassian mutters something in that other language again, looking darkly over at her, but he sits up and takes the caf she offers, and she sees the smallest hint of a smile before she turns to go. It’s not quite another _thank you_ , but she doesn’t need it to be.

* * *

Leia arrives, looking like she’s never been cold in her life. Jyn is torn between being bitter and being impressed. Luke, meanwhile, seems about as miserable as Bodhi. They’re dressed in identically oversized coats; clearly, the pilot warned the Jedi about the temperature.

As they approach Jyn and Cassian, waiting across the hanger (Cassian doing a passable job of pretending he didn’t wake up twenty minutes ago) Leia is finishing a conversation with Luke.

“He’s going to have to either learn to deal with the cold or actually follow through on his constant threats to leave the Rebellion. Maybe get himself a coat and retire that ridiculous vest.”

Luke ducks his head to hide a laugh.

“I’ll, uh, pass along the message,” he says, giving Bodhi a knowing look that Bodhi pretends not to notice, clearly uncomfortable being looked at to choose any sides at all.

Leia smiles, her Han-based annoyance evaporating as she reaches Rogue One’s leaders. She’s wearing a white coat, form-fitting and not very warm-looking at all, but she smiles a politician’s smile and doesn’t complain. Chirrut is muttering something to Baze that must be admiring, because Baze can’t stop glowering.

“I thought you were just being dramatic about the temperature,” Leia says by way of introduction, blunt as always. “Clearly, I was wrong. I’ll have a team of engineers sent out to replace the ones you’ve got, along with more material to see what we can do to insulate this place.”

“There’s a fairly steady rock foundation to this cave,” Cassian says. Casual, like he’s not miserable and cold and exhausted. Jyn admires both of them, able to carry on like this, like they’re not talking to each other through steaming breath. “If we want to build a sustainable base elsewhere, we’ll need walls. Floors. Build insulated areas inside the cave so we don’t melt the snow around us if we try to keep warm.”

“A tall order, but our Mos Eisley connection does work with asteroid miners, and they use something similar. I’ll see what I can do. Why don’t you show me what you’ve done so far?”

Cassian turns to find Jyn’s eyes, then, and he smiles at her.

“Jyn, would you mind?” he asks, which isn’t obvious at all. “I need to consult with K about the blast doors.”

Knowing that’s a load of bantha shit, Jyn still nods.

She knows what he’s doing. He’s forcing her to face her Princess-Leia-based insecurities head on. He knows that she needs this moment, needs Leia to see her working hard, working on something tangible in support of the Rebellion, not because _he_ thinks she needs to, but because _she_ thinks she needs to.

She feels a warmth creeping into her belly as she leads Leia out of the hanger. A warmth that feels like drinking a hot drink, or eating a hot meal after days of nothing but rations. A warmth that has nothing to do with leaving the hanger and moving into the slightly warmer tunnels beyond. A warmth that’s more like his arms around her, his weight resting on her chest and stomach. It’s a feeling that has become so uniquely _Cassian_ that it’s getting harder and harder to ignore.

“We have to keep a balanced temperature,” she explains. “So it can’t be too warm in here. Not just because of the cave, but because of the risk of thermal scans. Hence all the requests for warmer blankets. Warmer clothes. Warmer everything.”

“And we’re working on it, I promise you.  Mon Mothma is arranging to provide us with some new suppliers. The Empire is weak for now, but they’ll regain some of their strength in time. We still have to be cautious. We can’t risk them being able to trace anything back.”

“Of course,” Jyn says, feeling like a child on the end of a lecture. _I get it_ , she wants to say. _We’re just the grunts. I’m just reporting_. But her usual defensive nature is tempered by the desire she feels for Leia to respect her. “We’ve set up a command room through here. We had to use some of the insulation from one of the ships to line the equipment, because it was getting too hot and melting the snow. So far, it’s held up, but communications are spotty at best if anyone wanders too far. We haven’t experienced a real storm yet, but we’re a little worried about what the comms will do when one hits.”

“In my experience, they’ll be next to useless,” Leia admits, looking around at the equipment with a critical but ultimately approving eye. “This is good. You set this up quickly. Digging out the caves wasn’t too much trouble?”

“The first few days and nights were difficult,” Jyn admits. “If you want my advice, I wouldn’t move anyone in to the new base until the rooms are secure. We spent a lot of nights sleeping on the ships, and even that was brutal. You don’t seem too bothered yet, but the cold seeps into you. It’s hard to shake.”

“Blankets. Clothing. Insulation to keep the warmth in and keep it from melting the snow around us. Well, the damned Council could have picked a better hiding place, but at least it’s uninhabited. I should say it _was_ uninhabited. Now it has settlers. A real home.”

Leia’s smile, the warmth of it, doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and Jyn knows she’s being strong about Alderaan again.

_Strong_ , the Rebels all say behind the princess’s back. _She’s so strong_. They say it with awe, with reverence, with the kind of voices you reserve for the Force or heroes of myth rather than living women, barely twenty. Even Chirrut has a tendency to see only the iron rod holding her back straight and not the sagging weight of her humanity that needs to be held. Jyn understands the inclination to hero worship the princess who was tortured and stayed firm for the Rebellion. Maybe it’s because they’re so close in age, but Jyn has trouble reconciling that. Leia, she thinks, deserves to not have to be so strong all the time. Like Cassian, only resting some of his weight on her when it’s too much for him to bear, even though she’s always beside him, ready to help. She thinks Leia deserves to feel like there’s someone there to help.

“Let’s get some caf at the mess,” she says, and she leads the way.

* * *

“I’m impressed with all you’ve accomplished so far,” Leia says, addressing all of them in the command room. She sends an especially warm smile towards Cassian, who looks as neutral and calm as ever, though Jyn thinks half the people in this room would pay a high price to have such hearty praise leveled at them from the princess. “I know this may not seem like a very important assignment, but it is. You are the first colonists of our new home. The frontline in our new battle, the battle against time and a strain on resources. I know it’s cold. I know it’s miserable. But hopefully the knowledge that you are doing important work will keep you warm. Thank you, sincerely, thank you.”

She smiles at them all and nods to Cassian, who dismisses everyone but the Rogue One team. Luke heads off to the mess with the rest of the soldiers, forgetting that he’s one of the heroes of the Rebellion now. Leia starts to call after him, but changes her mind, smiling softly, shaking her head.

When it’s just Rogue One left, she seems more relaxed. Less vibrant, bright, blistering for the cause. She speaks less harshly, enunciates less. More like the girl who had eagerly chatted with Jyn about how disgusting tauntauns are in the mess earlier.

“As always, Captain Andor, I need to start by saying that we owe you and your team everything.”

Cassian smiles thinly, allowing a nod. He hates the ceremony, is as uncomfortable with it as Leia seems to be.

Chirrut remains, as always, annoyed that Cassian spoke for all of them when he said he didn’t want to partake in the celebration that saw Luke and Han receiving medals for their service, but Jyn still thinks it was the right decision. Cassian is used to being the man behind the scenes doing the difficult work with no recognition. Even the slightest kudos seems to make him wildly uncomfortable. Jyn’s not sure how she would have felt, standing up in front of people who didn’t know her, who only knew the parts of her story they’d managed to glean, who probably thought her more Imperial than Rebel. Bodhi still sometimes deals with Rebel soldiers who think they know better than leadership where his true loyalties lie. The thought of him having to endure all their eyes on him at once makes Jyn want to fight someone.

“Thank you,” Chirrut says, breaking the silence. “Yes, you owe us quite a lot.”

Cassian shoots him a glare that Chirrut grins at, not having to see it to know it’s there.

“One day, Cassian, you’ll get as used to accepting my thanks as Chirrut has,” Leia says with a smile.

“Unlikely,” K-2SO puts in. Leia’s smile turns into a hearty laugh, and Jyn’s glad that at least _someone_ thinks the droid is funny.

“You underestimate me,” Leia chides.

“No, I just know Cassian,” K-2SO says. Leia gives him a clearly doubtful look but decides to let it drop. Jyn thinks that’s probably a wise decision. She knows from experience how annoying it is to try and win an argument with K-2SO. Especially if that argument involves Cassian.

“Well, with my sincere thanks out of the way, let’s get back to business. Cassian, I’ll shadow you for the rest of the day. I want to know _everything_. Believe me, even if you think it’s not important, I want to know about it. I need to be able to bring a full report back to the Council before they’ll sign off on anything permanent. The most trivial details you can _conceive_ of. Tell me.”

K-2SO gives them all a few seconds to try and compile an internal list of things she might be interested in hearing before he asks, “does that include the fact that more than eighty percent of all members of this team have started sleeping with other members of this team to mitigate the effects of the cold?” At Leia’s raised eyebrows, Cassian’s muttered curses, and Chirrut’s hearty laugh, K-2SO looks around the room. “Well? Is that the kind of information you were looking for? Something like that?”


	7. I'm Not Going Anywhere

“Eighty percent, huh?”

Cassian’s shoulders might just pop out of their sockets if they get any more tense. He looks down at the princess, who doesn’t look at him, just strides next to him with a small, gentle smirk on her face.

“I don’t know where K got his data,” he says, already cringing in anticipation of her judgement.

“Apparently all over the place. _Eighty_ percent.”

“It’s…cold here,” Cassian says. He’s immediately glad that he left the rest of the team dealing with K-2SO back in the command center. Leia provides enough humiliation on her own, laughing sharply, her head thrown back.

“A brilliant analysis, Cassian. As always.”

“I’m…”

“I’m not criticizing. Don’t look at me like I’m about to reprimand you. You saved my father’s life, more than once, in service of the Rebellion. I’m not about to tell you off because eighty percent of your people are unsatisfied with the number of blankets we’ve been able to provide.”

“Yes, princess.”

“Leia. Seriously? _Princess_?”

“Leia.”

Leia rolls her eyes at him. She does that a lot. Cassian remembers when she was a bit younger, on Alderaan, still just as serious, still just as quick-witted, rolling her eyes at something Bail said to her. He forgets sometimes that this is the same person.

“Eighty percent,” she says again, wonderingly. “Well, the Council wanted more information. That’s a joke, before you get that hanged-man look again. The Council will find out soon enough what kind of frozen hellhole they’ve condemned us to. Better to let them figure it out on their own. It would embarrass them to be exposed as hypocrites later, punishing people for something they’ll probably resort to anyway.” Cassian allows a small laugh, which makes Leia’s face lighten even further. “Besides. Seems hardly fair to get you a reprimand for the behavior of your people when you aren’t even experiencing any of the benefits.”

If she notices the way Cassian’s step falters when she says that, if she has any ulterior reason for mentioning it, it doesn’t show on her face. She just continues onward, smile steady, eyes ahead of her.

* * *

“I was only trying to help.”

“You’re always trying to help,” Jyn mutters, pulling her hood up tighter as she peers out into the frozen wasteland. “Maybe you should try _not_ helping.”

“That would be counterproductive.”

She glances at K-2SO, who’s now far closer to her than he was before.

“What did I tell you about standing back? You know the wind messes with your joints.”

“I’m _bored_.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have outed half the base as sleeping with each other in front of Leia.”

“Eighty percent. That’s more than half.”

“Get back inside.”

“She asked for relevant information. It seemed relevant to me. If the cold is so intense that it drives people to sleep together when they would otherwise not be sleeping together, it is relevant.”

“Yeah, we get it. Get back inside.”

K-2SO sighs and tramps back into the hanger, leaving Jyn standing by the door, waiting.

At last, the two tauntauns come into view. Chirrut clinging onto Baze, looking exultant as the wind whips around him. Bodhi on the other tauntaun, looking quite the opposite.

“How’d it go?” she asks, grabbing the reins of Bodhi’s beast as it slows down in front of her. As always, the stench is surprising, almost overwhelming, but she’s slowly getting used to it.

“Sensor thirty-seven is still out. We couldn’t have gotten there and back before sundown. But the others are back up and running.” Bodhi jumps down from the tauntaun, a little unsteady, shaking his clothes off, spraying snow everywhere. Jyn laughs, ducking out of his way.

“I’ll handle thirty-seven tomorrow,” she says.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Allar and I can ride out early when you get ready to take Leia and Luke back.”

“Allar?” Baze asks, offended.

“Figure we can give the two old men a break,” Jyn says, her deadpan voice immediately ticking upwards into a laughing shriek as Baze dumps snow on her from the back of his tauntaun. “ _Baze_!”

“Old men,” Baze grumbles, stalking away, while Chirrut laughs and follows.

* * *

Cassian, as Jyn should have probably guessed, is kept busy for the rest of the day. Far after everyone else has gone off to bed, he stays sequestered in the command center with Leia, Luke, and Allar to work through some of the more pressing environmental issues while a top member of the Alliance brass is actually here, where she can address them. Jyn considers trying to join them – she’s sure both Cassian and Leia would be proud of her initiative, but she can’t quite work up the courage to demand to be where she was not asked for, especially since she knows her reasons for doing so are remarkably silly.

She doesn’t want to sleep alone.

When it comes down to it, when she strips away all the excuses, all the internal justifications, that’s what it’s about.

She’s dependent on him now. She’s dependent on him in a way she hasn’t been dependent on anyone in such a long time.

It’s scary enough when he’s here and she feels the contentment, the joy, the feeling that this is what is _supposed_ to happen. But the fear that grips her now, as she stands in their frozen, empty room, is something else.

When did it start to _matter_ so much?

She considers waiting up, reading or something, anything. She takes a longer shower than necessary, takes the time to carefully braid her hair. But when it’s clear Cassian isn’t coming, she slides her coat back on and climbs under her covers. Cassian’s blankets, tempting though they may be, stay folded on his cot a few feet away. If he comes in later, he won’t want to wake her. And being as self-sacrificing as he is, he’ll probably spend the night huddled in his jacket on a bare mattress. Better to leave the blankets where they are.

She spent every night before the last few alone. Never slept in someone else’s arms. Never experienced intimacy beyond what was unemotional and anonymous and too fast to be much more than a fleeting, painful pleasure. _This_ , this lonely feeling, this absence of warmth, this has been normal for most of her life. Has she become so softened since she met Cassian that this feels worse than it used to?

 _Stop it, Jyn,_ she scolds herself, pulling her hood around her ears and curling tightly into herself, shutting her eyes, arms hugged around her middle. _You’re behaving like a child. What would Saw think?_

Saw would think she put herself at risk by caring too much. He would think that sleeping with Cassian in the first place was admitting to a weakness, made worse by the way she held him last night, the way she comforted him, the way she telegraphed her feelings by responding to him, providing him warmth when he needed it. Saw would think that she was better off alone anyway.

Then again, he never would have approved of her staying with this team as long as she has, either. Saw gave away the chance to be any sort of moral compass, any sort of barometer for her decisions, when he abandoned her.

Even still, it takes her a while to fall asleep. And when she does, it’s with this quietly disappointed sadness, this feeling that she should be better than this. That Saw taught her better than this.

* * *

“We have to hurry,” Jyn says to Bodhi, leaning over his shoulder as he flies. Bodhi is cursing, using language she’s never heard the man use in waking life, but it seems natural in this dream. “He hasn’t got long, Bodhi!”

But suddenly they aren’t on a ship at all. They’re on Scarif, standing at the end of one long hallway, and Jyn sees Cassian at the other side, in a juncture that she somehow knows leads to prisoner cells.

“Hurry!” she says again, but she and Bodhi can’t seem to move quickly at all. Their legs no longer work, they bump into each other and slide in the sand even though Jyn knows they should be standing on metal floor. “ _Run_!”

And now she’s standing outside his cell, again with no preamble. Cassian is trembling, exhausted, pale, and Jyn tries to grasp at him through the bars, but he doesn’t see her. She tries to speak, but she can’t. She would be yelling herself hoarse if she could, but no sound comes from her throat except for an earnest whimper. Cassian’s fingers are broken, shattered, but still he reaches into his coat.

 _I’m right here_ , she tries to say. _I’m right here, Cassian._

But he can’t hear what she doesn’t speak, and he puts the pill into his mouth.

A scream, and she’s falling, falling from the tower on Scarif, her body landing beside his, her clouding over vision locked onto his open, unseeing eyes.

* * *

She wakes with a jolt, tangled in her blankets and coat, her breath a ragged gasp of horror, and she nearly slams her head right into the face that hovers above her.

“Jyn! It’s me!” Cassian hisses, in the dark mistaking her surprise for intent to injure. He grasps her swinging arm with one hand, puts his other on the side of her face, eyes wide with concern as he tries to get her to focus. She breathes out, managing to free one of her hands to grab his arm, needing to feel that he’s real, that this is real, that she’s awake.

“I’m sorry,” she manages. “I’m sorry, just a dream.”

Her eyes adjusting to the dark, she can see that the blankets on Cassian’s bunk are tangled, half fallen onto the floor. He was sleeping. She sighs, closes her eyes, shakes her head.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, and he pushes her hair, now hopelessly escaped from the braid she was so careful with, out of her face.

“It’s fine, Jyn,” he says. It’s said sincerely enough, but she still can’t quite bring herself to look at him. She also can’t bring herself to let go of his arm.

She pulls his hand away from her face, not wanting him to feel it heat up under his scrutiny.

“I’m okay,” she says, more firmly. “Just…a nightmare. That’s all. It happens sometimes.”

“You sounded afraid,” he says.

She’s suddenly more aware than she was before of just how close he is to her. He hovers over her, face scrunched up with concern, eyes flitting over her like he’s looking for injury. She wants to cry. She wants to pull him closer. She sits up instead, and it’s only because she’s so tired that she manages to say, “I _was_ afraid.”

She meets his eyes, her smile reluctant, a little helpless.

For a moment, they’re in the elevator again. Alone, the light flickering over his face.

“You fell,” she says.

Jyn has faced down everything life has thrown at her. Every choice she has made in the past few months has been counter to her old survival skills. Stay unattached. Don’t get too close. Don’t let people hurt you. Don’t depend on anyone but yourself, because people will leave you, will hurt you, will use you up.

But this? This requires more courage than anything else Jyn has ever done. By her metrics, fighting is easy. This admittance, this explanation of something inside her, is so much harder.

“Oh,” Cassian says. She’s not sure what to make of that, but she was prepared for it, and she launches into an explanation.

“Since Scarif…sometimes they capture Bodhi. Sometimes they put him through what Saw put him through. Sometimes they break every bone in his body while I watch and can’t do anything to help him. Sometimes Chirrut and Baze step in to fight for me and are gunned down. Sometimes K2, even. Don’t tell him I said that.”

“I won’t,” Cassian says gently.

“And you. Almost always, you fall, and I have to leave you. And you don’t get back up this time.”

“How often?”

How often does she have nightmares? Or how often does she dream about him falling? It doesn’t matter.

She will blame her exhaustion later for making her answer, “almost every night.”

He nods, looking as weary as she feels.

“Get undressed,” he says simply, and she gives him a nod in return.

They move silently, not speaking. She sheds her coat and warm pants. Cassian takes her things and moves them to his cot, trading them for the blankets piled there. His own clothes get mixed in with hers.

With Leia sleeping just across the hall, this feels even stranger than it already did. Even more damning, even more dangerous, even more codependent.

But she climbs under the covers and holds them open for Cassian to come in with her.

She doesn’t turn her back to him this time, and he pulls her in, pulls her close, hugs her the way he did in the hanger on Yavin, after Scarif, after he convinced her to stay and fight with him. He rests his chin on top of her head, and she listens to his heart in his chest – not the steady, thumping rhythm of a heart at rest but a hard, loud, jarring beat. He’s afraid. He’s afraid too.

She pulls back a little to look at him, her eyes traveling over his face. He still looks tired. Still looks worn down. She wants to ask him about what happened with Leia. Wants to ask him what Leia thought about K-2SO’s revelation. Last night, she would have.

But the threads of the dream are still clinging to her, and there’s something so vivid, so _real_ about his face in front of her. Something that catches in her throat, makes her own heart race and makes it impossible for her to find that easy banter that came so naturally the night before.

Her earlier reluctance to meet his eyes seems to have vanished, and now she can’t seem to look away.

The elevator on Scarif. It always comes back to the elevator on Scarif.

She thinks they move at the same time, in tandem, together as always, drawn closer. They hesitate together too, mere inches apart, and she’s shaking.

His eyes bore into hers, a question.

She’s the one who closes the distance. She provides an answer. She presses her lips to his.

Jyn has never kissed someone like this. She’s never kissed someone and had it feel like facing her fears, like opening her heart and spilling it. She has never kissed someone she cared about, never kissed someone she thought she would see in the morning.

She wonders if he knows. She wonders if he understands just how _much_ this one tiny movement has taken out of her.

When she pulls back, he follows her for a moment. Just long enough for her to feel it, long enough to know he doesn’t want her to leave.

“I’m…” she starts, at a loss, and she has no idea what she’s even going to say, so she’s grateful when he slides his hand along her jaw, when he cups her face, when he makes that growling noise she first heard yesterday and captures her lips again. But it’s gentler than the noise would seem to allow. He holds her like he thinks _he_ might be the one dreaming. When he pulls back, his lips travel to her forehead, to her hair, and he pulls her close again, and her lips tingle with the promise of all the tomorrows after this one.

“I’m right here,” he says, his voice quiet, like he’s afraid to scare her off. But insistent, too. She isn’t the only one who needs this. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

* * *

Later, she will remember that she tried to warn herself. She will remember that there’s a _reason_ Cassian was the first person to whom she opened her heart, and it was because she had only survived as long as she had by looking out for herself, by being smart enough to recognize that other people couldn’t be predicted.

Later, she will convince herself that _I’m not going anywhere_ was always going to be a lie, in the end.

“Captain Andor and K-2SO will be coming back to Yavin with us,” Leia says, and Jyn almost wants to laugh.

 _Why_ , she wants to ask. _Am I going too?_ But she doesn’t, because there’s a small part of her that worries that Leia’s impassive expression and the expectation in her gaze might be a test.

Being raised by Saw taught you a lot of things. The most important and lasting was that everyone was always testing you.  Paranoid, yes, but a survival skill all the same  

“Oh,” she says instead. “Who will be taking over Alpha Base?”

“For the time being, you will be in charge.”

A long pause at that. Jyn swallows a feeling that this isn’t _right_.

“Get someone else to do it.”

“You’ve done a wonderful thing here. You know how everything works, you know how to manage every part of this outpost, and you know how to manage these people. I’m sure you’ll do just as well with the replacement engineers. Captain Andor agrees it’s the right choice to leave you in charge.”

“Cassian is…all right with this?” Jyn asks, delicately. She shouldn’t ask, but there’s this ever-widening hole in her lungs that prevents her from being quiet.

His lips on hers, his hand on her jaw. _I’m not going anywhere_. There’s an explanation. Of course there’s an explanation.

And yet Leia says, “he requested it after he accepted the mission from General Draven.”

The hole in Jyn’s lungs abruptly becomes something she has to swallow around, a lump pulsing with uncertainty.

“Oh,” she says. “He accepted a mission.”

Leia looks concerned, like she’s thinking she shouldn’t have said anything.

“He said he was on his way to inform you earlier,” she says. “He must have missed you.”

Curled up in bed where he left her? For once waking before her, leaving before the morning alarm? Unlikely. Jyn forces a smile.

“Of course,” she says. “If you’ll excuse me, one of the sensors on the perimeter went out last night. I need to see to it.”

“We’ll likely be gone by the time you come back, if you want to say your goodbyes.”

The princess looks even more concerned now. She seems worried about the shuttered blankness of Jyn’s expression. Good. At least she still has the ability to pretend to be calm. Cold. Collected. Cassian isn’t the only one who can hide everything behind a false face. She shakes Leia’s hand warmly enough, because she doesn’t want the younger woman to think this is her fault, but she holds herself carefully, allowing no reaction.

She says a goodbye to Luke, too, as he’s talking to Chirrut in the training room. The warrior looks concerned, but she ignores the searching look he gives her, the way he tilts his head as if he can hear her heart thudding a wardrum in her chest. Even Luke’s enthusiasm can’t reach her, the way it usually does, but she gives him a hug and accepts his thanks for the extra blankets she found for him.

“Congratulations on the promotion,” Allar says when she pokes her head into the command center.

“Temporary promotion,” she replies, reflexively.

“Right, yeah. Of course. Though I guess it’s no surprise Draven roped the captain back into it. Always wondered how long it’d be before he got sick of _normal_ work like this. Toiling away on a ball of ice is probably _way_ less glamorous than going undercover on some Imperial moon to assassinate some chancellor. Or…whatever it is they do in intelligence. I don’t really know.”

That feeling seizes at Jyn again, that feeling like she desperately needs to breathe.

“Right,” she says, and she closes the door of the command center as she backs into the tunnel, not wanting to hear whatever Allar is going to say to qualify or apologize once he realize what he’s said. _Unimportant. Boring._ He may be right, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to hear.

* * *

When she finally finds him, he’s across the mess. He’s arguing with Baze, their voices pitched low, and Baze is the first one to spot her. When Cassian follows his eyeline, when he sees Jyn standing just inside the doorway, it’s like she’s looking at the man she met back on Yavin. The man who coolly asked her how long it had been since she spoke to her Imperial father, her traitor father. Whose cold tone implied that she was made of the same stuff Galen Erso was. It’s as if the past months never happened.

But no, no. She has to remember. She has to remember the way he pulled her back into the kiss when she tried to end it.

He looks at her for a long time like that, unmoving, and she waits.

She gives him a chance. That’s what hurts the most, after. She gave him a chance.

He turns back to look at Baze, says a few quiet words. And then, as if he had not seen her, he exits the mess through the back door, towards the radar surveillance room.

Baze starts towards her, but she shakes her head. There are seven other people in this room, eating and talking. Leia is one of them, sipping caf with Mai, pretending not to notice Jyn in the door. They haven’t realized yet that anything is wrong. Better not to let them. And if Baze says anything kind to her, she might just start crying.

She turns around and leaves, moving in the opposite direction.

* * *

 _You knew it was a mistake to kiss him_ , she tells herself. _This is your fault._

* * *

K-2SO is waiting in the hanger, loading up the ship. Bodhi looks anxious, standing on the ramp.

“You’ve heard,” he guesses.

“That Cassian is abandoning us and leaving me in charge of this frozen rock? Course I’ve heard.”

She pulls her heavy gloves on with a bit too much force.

“I don’t understand,” Bodhi says, and at least there’s _someone_ here who’s as blindsided, as hurt, as Jyn is, even though she isn’t showing it.

“You didn’t think Cassian was going to stay here forever, did you?” K-2SO asks. His smug voice is more irritating even than usual, and Jyn squeezes Bodhi’s shoulder. Trying to be comforting. Trying to be strong. “We’ve got important missions to run. Spy missions. Missions you can’t come on.”

“K, make yourself useful for once and log me as taking a tauntaun to fix sensor thirty-seven,” Jyn says, talking over K-2SO’s babble, because she’s certain she’ll start crying if she doesn’t.

It’s not that it’s hard to believe. It’s that it’s too _easy_. It’s Saw handing her a pistol and leaving her behind. It’s her mother squeezing her hands and telling her to go. It’s everyone leaving her eventually.

“By yourself?” Bodhi asks, taking hold of the fur-lined hood of her coat, trying to stop her.

“Need some _me_ time,” Jyn replies, shaking him off as gently as she can. “I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t you want to say goodbye to Cassian?” K-2SO asks, as always unable to comprehend a world at which Cassian isn’t the center.

“Why don’t you tell him for me?” Jyn mutters, pulling on her goggles.

“I’ll find out what’s going on,” Bodhi says, and this time it’s her hand that he grabs.

“Isn’t it obvious what’s going on?” K-2SO asks, and Jyn barely swallows a too-obvious order for him to fuck off and let her talk to Bodhi in peace. “Cassian is too important to the Rebellion to stay where his expertise is wasted. There was always a ninety-three percent chance of him leaving.”

_I’m not going anywhere._

Bodhi says something quiet and angry in reply to K-2SO, something that starts with “ _can’t you see_ …”, and there are a million things that could follow that preamble, but they’re all embarrassing. They all make her feel guilty, feel obvious, feel _hurt_.

“I’ll see you when you get back, Bodhi,” she says loudly, already stalking across the hanger. The tauntauns start to grunt and snort, excited to see her approach.

And her hands tremble, her legs tremble, her breath catches in her throat. She mounts the tauntaun and hits the control to open the door to the hanger. It groans as she rides the fidgety creature toward the entrance. There are voices from behind her, but she tunes them out. K-2SO saying, “she said to say goodbye for her.”

And if Cassian even says anything in reply, if he even _wants_ to stop her, it’s lost in the wind that whips around Jyn as she sets off into the morning air.

* * *

Cassian does try to stop her, but he isn’t surprised when she doesn’t.

* * *

With Leia sitting in the cockpit, just behind the co-pilot’s seat, Cassian paces. It’s inappropriate. He can’t just ask her to go somewhere else, back to the main hold with Luke so he can talk to his pilot in private. He can’t ask her to do that because then she’ll know something. And it’s important that she _not_ know anything. That’s the whole point of this.

But he missed his chance to say something in the mess, and he panicked and made things even worse than they would have been, and then she rode off angry, and he’s loath to miss a chance to say something now. Which is why, less than an hour into the flight, he leans over Bodhi’s seat and quietly says, “tell her this wasn’t my choice.”

Leia’s eyebrows shoot up, but she otherwise remains impassive, pretends to be focusing intently on the datapad in her hands. Bodhi scoffs a little.

“No choice, eh? That’s not what K2 said.”

“What did K say?”

“I tried to remind her to say goodbye to you,” K-2SO puts in.

“That’s more than enough out of you,” Cassian warns.

“What? I only told her the truth. You’re far too important to sit in an ice cave with a useless group of rabble while there are missions out there to run.”

“Is that seriously what he…?”

“More or less,” Bodhi admits.

“K!” Hissed like a curse word. “Bodhi, you’ll tell her that’s not true?”

“Like she’ll believe me,” Bodhi says, his wounded expression indicating that he doesn’t even believe it.

“She can’t think... I don’t want her to think…”

Bodhi gives him a look that briefly stills his tongue. Full of hurt and pity both.

“You could’ve refused the mission,” he says. Leia’s lips purse a little, but she doesn’t say anything. _And this is why_ , Cassian wants to say. _This is why I had to take it. If they had any idea how much I need you and Jyn and Chirrut and Baze, they would think we needed to be split up. Draven made himself clear. I did this for all of us_.

“I couldn’t, Bodhi. But I’ll be back.”

“I’m sure she’ll believe that,” Bodhi says, poking at his navigation screen with more concentration than it requires. Uncharacteristically cruel when he adds, “just like she believed Saw Gerrera.”

* * *

That night, Jyn enters her room to find that the comfortable bed, Leia’s bed, the bed that was supposed to go to Cassian, has been moved into her room. The other two cots are gone. She has four blankets, now. _One from Bodhi_ , she thinks, and her eyes begin to burn, begin to water.

And on the end of her bed, folded in the irritatingly neat way she recognizes, Cassian’s blue coat. The one he wore on Jedha.

For a long time, she only looks at it. Her face and fingers are tingling with new warmth after spending so long outside, just to be sure he was gone. And the hopeless chasm in her chest has opened up pain she didn’t know she was capable of feeling. And now this. This offering. This promise. This confusing token from a man who last night whispered into her hair that he wasn’t going to leave her.

She didn’t even have to tell him about her worst dreams. The dreams where he smiles at her. Hands her a blaster and says he’ll be back by dawn. The dreams where he leaves her and she knows he won’t be coming back.

It’s not a blaster he’s given her, but a coat. He’s still gone. The dream still came true.

But she wraps it around herself anyway and breathes him in, and she feels Saw’s smug self-righteousness, his certainty that he was right all along. And he _was_ right. She pushed too hard. She opened herself up and forgot to defend herself against the blows she should have seen coming.

 _Everyone will leave you_ , Saw says in her mind. _Or you will leave them. In the end, you are always going to be alone._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is probably a great time to remind everyone that this is definitely NOT the last part of the series, and that I'll be posting a quick one-shot as soon as I finish writing it, to bridge the gap between this mission and the next! 
> 
> And also I'm sorry
> 
> And also thank you all for reading and thank you for your wonderful comments! They sincerely make my day, and also I'm really sorry again but this angst train has just started chugging.


End file.
